Why does no one today acknowledge the massive debt Faulkner owes to Conrad? The grandoliquence that is labeled Faulknerian is actually Conradian, even down to the almost non-sensical metaphors.
>One of those drifting trees grounded on the shelving shore, just by the house, and Almayer, neglecting his dream, watched it with languid interest. The tree swung slowly round, amid the hiss and foam of the water, and soon getting free of the obstruction began to move down stream again, rolling slowly over, raising upwards a long, denuded branch, like a hand lifted in mute appeal to heaven against the river’s brutal and unnecessary violence.

>>24558525 (OP)
top 5 Conrad books?

The debt is well acknowledged.
Conrad is considered one of the biggest precursors to modernism, as far as I know. The introduction to my edition of HOD goes over this in a lot of detail. Not just his prose, but the jumping around in time in eg Nostromo or The Rover

>>24558528
Lord jim
Heart of Darkness
Nostromo
The secret agent
Ehhhhhhh....peepeepoopoo

I have inherited a library with some Conrad books. Can /lit/ tell me which ones are worth reading?

>Heart of Darkness
>Victory
>Lord Jim
>Under Western Eyes
>The Secret Agent
>Nostromo
>Almayer's Folly
>An Outcast of the Islands
>The Rescue

Is everything good that he wrote here or do I need more? Thanks

>>24558542
Conrad today is most famous for HSers shitting on Heart of Darkness and Nabokov shitting on him for his more serious works.

>>24558553
The secret agent is what pynchon has copied a great deal, most of his career.

>>24558553
You need The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and The Shadow Line.

>>24558549
>Has a chance to say nigger and be in topic
>Fumbles it
God damn anon

Holy crap! It's like Faulkner was copypasting from him, but with southern dialect swapped in.
>Her face turned towards the outer darkness, through which her dreamy eyes seemed to see some entrancing picture, wore a look of impatient expectancy. She was tall for a half-caste, with the correct profile of the father, modified and strengthened by the squareness of the lower part of the face inherited from her maternal ancestors — the Sulu pirates. Her firm mouth, with the lips slightly parted and disclosing a gleam of white teeth, put a vague suggestion of ferocity into the impatient expression of her features. And yet her dark and perfect eyes had all the tender softness of expression common to Malay women, but with a gleam of superior intelligence; they looked gravely, wide open and steady, as if facing something invisible to all other eyes, while she stood there all in white, straight, flexible, graceful, unconscious of herself, her low but broad forehead crowned with a shining mass of long black hair that fell in heavy tresses over her shoulders, and made her pale olive complexion look paler still by the contrast of its coal-black hue.

>>24558901
>In the window the cracked shade, yawning now and then with a faint rasp against the frame, let twilight into the room in fainting surges. From beneath the shade the smoke-colored twilight emerged in slow puffs like signal smoke from a blanket, thickening in the room. The china figures which supported the clock gleamed in hushed smooth flexions: knee, elbow, flank, arm and breast in attitudes of voluptuous lassitude. The glass face, become mirror-like, appeared to hold all reluctant light, holding in its tranquil depths a quiet gesture of moribund time, one-armed like a veteran from the wars. Half past ten o'clock. Temple lay in the bed, looking at the clock, thinking about half-past-ten-o'clock. She wore a too-large gown of cerise crepe, black against the linen. Her hair was a black sprawl, combed out now; her face, throat and arms outside the covers were gray. After the others left the room. she lay for a time, head and all beneath the covers. She lay so until she heard the door shut and the descending feet, the doctor's light, unceasing voice and Miss Reba's labored breath grow twilight-colored in the dingy hall and die away.

>>24558525 (OP)
What do you mean by "no-one" and what do you mean by "acknowledge"? Anyone who's read them both can see the Conrad in Faulkner.

In a 1956 Paris Review interview Faulkner, listing authors he liked, mentioned Conrad right away:


INTERVIEWER
Do you read your contemporaries?

FAULKNER
No, the books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to old friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes, Don Quixote — I read that every year, as some do the Bible. Flaubert, Balzac — he created an intact world of his own, a bloodstream running through twenty books — Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Shakespeare. I read Melville occasionally and, of the poets, Marlowe, Campion, Jonson, Herrick, Donne, Keats, and Shelley. I still read Housman. I’ve read these books so often that I don’t always begin at page one and read on to the end. I just read one scene, or about one character, just as you’d meet and talk to a friend for a few minutes.


Interesting that he doesn’t mention Mann, given that supposedly he thought Buddenbrooks was the best novel of the 19th century. (Mind you I don't know the context of that. Might have been a casual remark, e.g. Someone said "Mann's no good" so he goes the other way, exaggerating as a rejoinder, then gets held to it.)


On a related note:— some people think he was a bit coy about Ulysses, don they? (Given he claimed never to have read it when he wrote the stream-of-consciousness stuff like Sound & Fury.)

Maybe they're being a bit over-suspicious. Ulysses was only published in 1922, incomplete, with limited distribution. And e.g. James Thurber's review certainly suggests it was not readily available in the USA in the 1920s:

The brazen entry into the United States of Mr. Joyce’s *Ulysses* has most recently brought the *Odyssey* again into view; as the magazine *Time* points out to its surprised readers, ‘almost every detail of the *Odyssey*’s action can be found in disguised form in Ulysses!’ So, many a reader might naturally enough ask, what?

— James Thurber, ‘The Nation’, 1934