The Secret Agent (1907) By Joseph Conrad

While Joseph Conrad is highly regarded as an author, I’ve not previously read any of his works, not even his classics Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.  A friend however sent me a copy of Conrad’s The Secret Agent, so I decided to give it a try. 

The book had many good points and a solid story line, but I found it very difficult to read.  While it is only 249 pages, it took me a couple of weeks to complete, partly because I’ve been busy, and partly because I found it a challenge to maintain interest long enough to finish each chapter.   And believe me, he’s not the type of writer one can put down mid-chapter, because if you do, you must start the chapter over again at the beginning.

Conrad, one could say, likes compound sentences.  In fact, he excels at them.  They are grammatically correct mind you, but several of them are two and three pages long.  I often found myself losing the noun and verb, long before I found the period.

This is not to say the story itself was bad, quite the contrary.

Set in London, the main character is a Mr. Verloc.  He is a secret agent in the employ of a never named foreign embassy. In reality however, he’s not a secret, in fact he has a close working relationship with a London police inspector – a sort of “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch your back” kind of relationship.  The plot commences when both of them end up with new bosses. They share in common an exceedingly low opinion of their new directors.

Verloc is pressured by his new boss to find someone who can set off a bomb at the Greenwich Observatory (don’t ask why, it’s detailed, in detail, in an early chapter).  When he does, the story unfolds, and the final chapters read as fast, as the early chapters read slow.  The chapter near the end of the book when Verloc’s wife finds out what is going on is an excellent and memorable piece of literature.

The book does touch on some fascinating issues however: the difference between an anarchist and a revolutionary, the role of women in the late 1800s early 1900s, and (no spoiler here) the character Stevie.  

Recommendation:  For literature majors only; and even then just long enough to finish your coursework.

Click on Amazon to purchase this book. 

Nazim Hikmet: The Life and Times of Turkey's World Poet (English, 2013) By Mutlu Konuk Blasing

While Mutlu Konuk Blasing’s biography of Nazim Hikmet makes for an interesting read today, my guess is it will be an even more interesting and educational read 100 years from now when removed from the lethal politics of this era.

The book’s subtitle is: The Life and Times of Turkey’s World Poet.  It is one part literary critique, and one part political history.  Some might think that an odd combination, but it’s not.  Literature has always played a central role in political movements.  Could democracy be understood without “When in the course of human events” or communism without “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” or the forever relevant: “What happens to a dream deferred?” 

Literature defines society, and more often than not, it is penned by a poet.

Hikmet is a Turkish poet revered by the Turkish people. He spent much of life as a political prisoner, or in exile in Soviet Union.  As an unrepentant communist, he was feared by the Turkish government because his writings could steer the hearts of the country as it was still trying to find its way in the world after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

Hikmet died in Moscow in 1963 and is buried there, though his request was to be buried in a village in Anatolia.  His love affair with his native country and its native language is what has endeared him to its people.  His verse, particularly his epic Human Landscapes from My Country, tells of the average citizen, without romanticizing their existence – an antidote to the “orientalist” viewpoint of Turkey exported to the western world.  Significantly, his work was banned in Turkey until two years after his death.  It was through illegal copying and sharing that Hikmet was widely read in his home country.  He was read by both the intelligentsia and the working class – he spoke to both of them.

Linguistics is not usually my area of interest; but it is covered in depth in Blasing’s book.  Her chapter on Turkey’s conversion to the Latin alphabet is fascinating.  The Turkish language has never been Arabic, but because the Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state, Arabic was used for the alphabet.  Problem was, a lot of the sounds used in the Turkish language, don’t have counterparts in Arabic – and a lot of the sounds used in Arabic, aren’t used in the Turkish language.   One of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s, founder of the Turkish Republic, lasting modernizations was converting Turkey’s alphabet, to one which more closely matched its spoken language.

Why is that important to this story?  Because Hikmet wrote his work in this new alphabet, making it accessible to the entire population, not just the elite who could read Arabic.

I mentioned earlier that my belief is this book will become more interesting in the years ahead.  I say this because so much of Hikmet’s life’s story is tied up in the politics of his time, the peak of Communism, and the rise of Fascism.  What is lost when one reads through these filters is that Hikmet was popular with the people because he spoke to their needs, which were not being met by any of the powers of the day – and this included his disillusionment because of the unfulfilled agenda personified in Lenin.

For an American who grew up in the 1950’s and 60’s, these are powerful and hard to undo filters.  The meanest taunt one could use when I was a kid was “pinko commie…”  The politics of this was black & white, there was no gray area.  While Hikmet was a “card-carrying” communist, his actual philosophy veers closer to socialism – an ideology that Americans are still not able to differentiate.

Recommendation:  One has to have a strong interest in either poetry or political history for this book.  I recommend it highly.