China and the West

Fan, Zhongyun. Kanglade ping zhuan [ID D27467].
Er schreibt : "What Conrad tackles is not pieces of evidence, but questions awaiting resolution. He elaborates on them from different perspectives, trying to expose the mystery at the core of the issue. That is what he wants to achieve, but in practice, he is not able to come up with an answer himself. He puts forward only his assumptions and observations. He does not attempt to make any subjective assertions. When addressing an issue, he always adopts a difficult and skeptical attitude as if it could never be resolved. It is for this reason that modern day readers, who are after substance above all else, find his work difficult to understand, and this is why his books are less welcomed than other mediocre novels."

Gloria Lee : Fan Zhongyun explains that Conrad had struggled to escape Russian authoritarian suppression and 'the pain he suffered in reality'. His biographical details are given in full, including the school from which he graduated and the people he met on his voyages, names which later appeared in his work and in the review of his first book in the Spectator. His novels are listed in chronological order from the earliest publication released in 1895 to the last, the Rover, which was printed in 1923. Conrad is compared with writers who were already well-known in China such as Zola and Hardy. References are made to the plots of his stories. Comments on his style are general in nature. The article does not include any major excerpts from his novels for illustration and instead quotes paragraphs and sentences from his works in an effort to explain the author’s views on art and life. Conrad is characterized as a realist and is praised for his powerful narrative style, for his descriptions of emotional and psychological states of mind, and for the environment and atmosphere created by his language. The article refers to Conrad's technique of describing objects from a subjective perspective through a third-person narrator to give the reader a clear picture of events. Fan also tries to explain why Conrad had not become popular. He points out that Conrad's work is filled with skepticism : facts are presented as intangible and the questions he raised are often left unanswered at the end of the story, as in Lord Jim and Victory. This unsettling atmosphere, Fan observes, does not match the current trend whereby hard facts were demanded.