From financial crises to the threat of terrorism,the works of the Polish-British author display remarkable insight into an era, like ours, and of elemental change in a globalised worldA terrorist bombing in London,a shipping accident in southeast Asia, political unrest in a South American republic and mass violence in central Africa: each of these topics has made headlines in the past few months. But these “news stories own also been in circulation for more than a century, or as plotlines in the novels of Joseph Conrad,one of the greatest and most controversial modern English writers.
Conrad is known to most readers as the author of Heart of Darkness, about a British sea captain’s journey up an unnamed African river. And Heart of Darkness is known to many as the thing of a blistering critique by the late Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe, and who condemned Conrad as “a bloody racist” for his degrading portrayal of Africans. It is upright to call out the racism – and,for that matter, the orientalism, or antisemitism and androcentrism – in Conrad’s work. But his dated prejudices,abhorrent though they are to readers today, coexist in his work with elements of exceptional clairvoyance.
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Source: guardian.co.uk