The Secret Agent JOSEPH CONRAD

With an Introduction and Notes by Hugh Epstein, Secretary of the Joseph Conrad Society of Great Britain
'Then the vision of an enormous town prented itself, of a monstrous town...a cruel devourer of the world's light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five millions of lives.'
Conrad's 'monstrous town' is London, and his story of espionage and counter-espionage, anarchists and embassies, is a detective story that becomes the story of Winnie Verloc's tenacity in maintaining her devotion to her peculiar and simple-minded brother, Stevie, as they pursue their very ordinary lives above a rather dubious shop in the back streets of Soho.

Book Description
The Wordsworth Classics covers a huge list of beloved works of literature in English and translations. This growing series is rigorously updated, with scholarly introductions and notes added to new titles.

Set in London in the last decade of the 19th century, this is an ironic tale of the seedy "demi-monde" of espionage, counter-espionage and the miseries inflicted on innocent and simple people by political extremism. It draws on Conrad's own emotional background and experience.

The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature
(in full The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale) Novel by Joseph Conrad, first published serially in the New York weekly Ridgeway's in 1906-07 and in book form in 1907. This absurdist story is noted for its adept characterizations, melodramatic irony, and psychological intrigue. Adolf Verloc is a languid eastern European secret agent posing as a London shop owner with anarchist leanings who is ordered to dynamite Greenwich Observatory. The plot fails when Verloc's mentally retarded brother-in-law is accidently killed by the explosives. Verloc's wife Winnie murders Verloc in a fit of rage. She commits suicide after she is betrayed by Ossipon, one of her husband's anarchist associates.

From AudioFile
Thoroughly ironic and even sarcastic, this early, atypical Conrad novel is an ultimately tragic, comedy of errors spy story, which challenges the oral interpreter to set the right tone. Lean too heavily on the Dickensian caricatures and the tale seems a tastelessly cruel joke. Go too far the other way and you miss the point, as well as the humor. In a laconic narration, Alex Jennings renders the abridgment slyly and gives excellent impersonations of the characters. However, the recording still misses something essential in the book's personality. Y.R.

About Author
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) grew up amid political unrest in Russian-occupied Poland. After twenty years at sea with the French and British merchant navies, he settled in England in 1894. Over the next three decades he revolutionized the English novel with works such as Typhoon (1902), Youth (1902), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Chance (1913), and Victory (1915).

Book Dimension :
length: (cm)19.8 　　　　　　　　　　　　　 width:(cm)12.6