>>25217097
Many are.

I love Conrad and I think people who speak ill of him have something fundamentally wrong with their character. That being said, it's not a contest. Conrad and Faulkner are both good writers.

>>25217107
Faulkner was a shameless Conrad imitator

>>25217097
Toni Morrison mogs Faulkner too. Many authors to choose from in that respect.

>>25217097
aside from heart of darkness and nostromo, does he have anything i should go out of my way to read?

>>25217128
The Secret Agent, and Lord Jim.

>>25217128
The Nigger of the Narcissus

>>25217097
>Essentially a writer for very young people. Certainly inferior to Hemingway and Wells. Intolerable souvenir-shop style, romanticist clichés. Nothing I would care to have written myself. In mentality and emotion, hopelessly juvenile. Romantic in the large sense. Slightly bogus.

Rare case where Nabokov was right about a writer.

>>25217153
What did he say about Faulkner?
Personally I gave him a shot and his short stories were tolerable. But as soon as the length stretched out even a little bit everything immediately became bogged down with endless asides and pages of characterization that didn't create a character I understood and so on. I imagine reading something like the Sound and the Fury would be an immense chore.

>>25217151
The AYY YO WHAT?:

>>25217153
He was right about Melville, Joyce, Shakespeare, Bely and Milton.
He was wrong about Conrad though
>>25217158
>Dislike him. Writer of corncobby chronicles. To consider them masterpieces is an absurd delusion. A nonentity, means absolutely nothing to me.

>>25217097
To me, Conrad is like if Henry James had to become a sailor instead of sipping tea in a parlour.
Just endless equivocations and asides and narratives within narratives that grope for word after word to vainly make some kind of philosophic notion into a tangible feeling.
Not to say I dislike him completely but my patience wears thin. I want to tell him that I get the point every 20 pages or so.

>One source of difficulty and disagreement is, of course, to be found where men have at all times found it, in his beauty. One opens his pages and feels as Helen must have felt when she looked in her glass and realised that, do what she would, she could never in any circumstances pass for a plain woman. So Conrad had been gifted, so he had schooled himself, and such was his obligation to a strange language wooed characteristically for its Latin qualities rather than its Saxon that it seemed impossible for him to make an ugly or insignificant movement of the pen. His mistress, his style, is a little somnolent sometimes in repose. But let somebody speak to her, and then how magnificently she bears down upon us, with what colour, triumph, and majesty! Yet it is arguable that Conrad would have gained both in credit and in popularity if he had written what he had to write without this incessant care for appearances. They block and impede and distract, his critics say, pointing to those famous passages which it is becoming the habit to lift from their context and exhibit among other cut flowers of English prose. He was self-conscious and stiff and ornate, they complain, and the sound of his own voice was dearer to him than the voice of humanity in its anguish. The criticism is familiar, and as difficult to refute as the remarks of deaf people when Figaro is played. They see the orchestra; far off they hear a dismal scrape of sound; their own remarks are interrupted, and, very naturally, they conclude that the ends of life would be better served if instead of scraping Mozart those fifty fiddlers broke stones upon the road. That beauty teaches, that beauty is a disciplinarian, how are we to convince them, since her teaching is inseparable from the sound of her voice and to that they are deaf? But read Conrad, not in birthday books but in the bulk, and he must be lost indeed to the meaning of words who does not hear in that rather stiff and sombre music, with its reserve, its pride, its vast and implacable integrity, how it is better to be good than bad, how loyalty is good and honesty and courage, though ostensibly Conrad is concerned merely to show us the beauty of a night at sea. But it is ill work dragging such intimations from their element. Dried in our little saucers, without the magic and mystery of language, they lose their power to excite and goad; they lose the drastic power which is a constant quality of Conrad's prose.
-Virginia Woolf