Into the darkness
The fact that English happened to be his third language, after French and his native Polish, did not prevent him from forging a reputation as a masterful stylist. Indeed, TE Lawrence described him as “the most haunting thing in prose that ever was” and put it that each paragraph Conrad wrote “goes on sounding like waves, like the note of a tenor bell, after it stops”.
Particularly gifted in portraying place and in establishing and developing atmosphere, his works, including Nostromo, The Nigger of Narcissus, The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness (which inspired Coppola’s cinematic tour de force, Apocalypse Now), rank among the finest that the century would produce.
