Let the book buyer beware. I purchased a copy of The Arrow of Gold by Joseph Conrad to read during last July’s vacation and I didn’t exactly get what I expected. Words like “most romantic novel,” “cloak-and-dagger,” and “dangerous gunrunning schemes” are used on the back cover, and a ship at full sail on high seas is pictured on the front. To wit, I was left with the distinct impression that swashes would be buckled, damsels would be distressed, and that there would definitely be armfuls of boats involved. I am an emptor without my proper sense of caveat, and I ought to know better. I read Heart of Darkness. There is at least a boat in that one, but mostly it’s a dark little story about the primitive evil which lurks in the human heart. OK. Not vacation reading. So here I am, 196 pages into this 284 page long monstrosity: Pirates? Absolutely not. Romance? Precious little. Boats? Casually mentioned. Endless pages of cryptic dialogue even this bibliophile can’t understand or enjoy? Plenty. Another back page summary found on Amazon uses words to describe this story including “profound meditation on the emotional distance between people,” the “crushing weight of loss,” and “recklessness of unadorned sincerity.” I don’t know what any of those things are doing in a high-seas adventure story, but Conrad should’ve left them out and shoved the spaces they left behind full of pirate captains and casks of rum.

I’m going to Barnes and Noble later and buying a real adventure book, but not before I make sure that someone actually gets run through with a cutlass in the first ten pages.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 at 11:16 am and is filed under From the nation of Indig. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.