Virginia Woolf asserted that Lord Jim was Conrad's most excellent book.

And who am I to dispute with Woolf? So, I will give up my literary critic identification card and freely confess that it was merely tiresome to struggle until the end of it. I'm glad it's done. I require to read something light to take a break from my recent binge on classics.

REREAD: I didn't loathe it this time. Still, I didn't love it either. Heart of Darkness is superior and addresses several of the same themes and motifs in a far more concise work. Sorry, Virginia. Nope.

Perhaps the problem with Lord Jim is that it just doesn't grip me in the way that other Conrad works do. The story feels a bit drawn out and the characters, while interesting, don't quite come alive for me.

However, I can see why some people might love this book. It has its moments of beauty and depth, and Conrad's writing is always a pleasure to read.

Maybe I'll give it another try someday, but for now, I'm moving on to something else.

If you are a serious student of Conrad, you must read Typhoon, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim.

After reading Lord Jim, a comparison with Heart of Darkness is unavoidable. The two books were published a year apart. Conrad began Lord Jim first, then put it aside to write and publish HOD, and finally completed the expanded Lord Jim. Much of the tone, themes, imagery, and even language are similar if not identical.

Heart of Darkness, in my opinion, is the better literary work and is on a short list of my all-time favorite novels. It is elegant, simple, focused, relentless, and inevitable. Lord Jim, on the other hand, is a more ambitious work, complicated both in its telling and design, and ultimately more human.

Whereas HOD is fable-like in its earnest minimalism, Lord Jim is intentionally complex, with an almost Faulkneresque omnipresence. Both works present a dialogue between Marlowe and another. In HOD, it is Kurtz, Elliot’s Hollow Man. In Lord Jim, it is Jim, an idealistic but tragic hero; perhaps a nineteenth-century Everyman, blessed and cursed alike by maritime European imperialism.

Marlowe is a narrator of Kurtz’s story, while he is a central character and a sympathetic observer of Jim. It is this interaction between Marlowe and Jim that reminds me of The Great Gatsby, and there is some evidence that Fitzgerald was an admirer of Conrad’s.