corollary

Entry #201

Listening to:

Dvorak, string quartet in E flat major, op. 51.

Just read:

Joseph Conrad, Victory. I enjoyed this novel, but then, I am something of a Conrad fan. It's set in south-east Asia, and is basically the story of how a recluse rescues a young woman from a difficult situation, and takes her away to live with him on his "own" private island. But then, a trio of bad guys turn up under the impression that the recluse is sitting on a pot of gold.

In common with the other Conrad I have read, the novel is full of beautiful description and is also well-plotted; really being quite exciting. The narration starts out in the hands of a completely anonymous individual who just happens to know most of the main characters, and then shifts closer to the action. It's definitely effective.

The characters are also quite compelling. The evil trio is particularly malevolent and really keeps one's attention. They would do fantastically well in a film, and there have been quite a few films made of the novel. (See this IMDB page for an extensive Conrad filmography.) The only thing that bothered me was the relationship between the recluse and the woman. They have a series of conversations that read extremely badly, and they never manage to say anything that connects either with the reader or the other person. I decided after finishing the book that this was deliberate; part of the point of the novel is that Heyst, the recluse, is unable to really connect (shades of Forster) with others, let alone a woman.

I suppose it's also worth saying that the novel espouses its fair share of racist and sexist attitudes, typical of the era when it was written (pre-WWI).

To read next:

Joseph Conrad, The secret agent. I know in advance that this novel is set in London.

Some links today:

• This page is all about Kiwi "ingenuity": it tells the (quite amusing) story of a guy building a jet engine to provide cooling for beers in a shed. (In fact, that's not really why it was done if you read some of the links at the bottom of the page.) The page was Slash-dotted, meaning that by virtue of the attention garnered from being one of the Slashdot stories, the site was deluged by attention.
• This allows me to segue gracefully into my next link. (I've never thought that segue was a word that implied grace in any shape or form; to my mind, the sound of it suggests you're more likely to segue slitheringly, or sleazily.) The programming language shootout page is a neat experiment that seeks to compare the efficiency and expressivity of a variety of language in performing simple tasks. There are roughly two dozen language implementations compared, and there are about 30 tests. Interestingly, though the best performance is usually gained by C, the functional languages ML (with the MLton compiler) and Ocaml perform extremely well in comparison, and usually much better than languages such as Perl, Python or Java. The source code for each solution is also available, and the author of the page is happy to have programmers submit improved versions of the code.

  But where's my segue? Well, the shoot-out page was also "slash-dotted"; and here's the author's interesting take on it all.

• Finally, Bush, the environmentalist; he just wants to rid America's clean, green national parks of all that nasty oil stuff.