Cuentos de inquietud (Tales of Unrest) Book

The stories here are from Conrad's early period, in the last decade of 19th century. Given below are my ratings for each of them, along with the setting.

Karain: a memory - 4 (Malaya)
The Idiots - 4.5 (Rural France)
An Outpost of Progress - 5 (Congo)
The Return - 4.5 (London)
The Lagoon - 3 (Malaya)

Of these, An Outpost of Progress stands out, and can be read as a sort of precursor to Heart of Darkness. In the story, we see the disintegration that befalls when white men stay in an outpost in dark dark Africa.

The general collapse toward some sort of hysteria / insanity remains a common theme in all the stories. And except the Congo story, the Woman remains an enigmatic locus, at once the object of desire and the agency of deception and folly.

As far as the writing goes, it is top notch, if one focuses on the turn of phrases and the metaphors more than the statis that Conrad forces on his scenes. Let me give some sentences from the story 'The Return'

The inner circle train from the City rushed impetuously out of a black hole and pulled up with a discordant, grinding racket in the smirched twilight of a West-End station.

She strode like a grenadier, was strong and upright like an obelisk, had a beautiful face, a candid brow, pure eyes, and not a thought of her own in her head.

There are in life events, contacts, glimpses, that seem brutally to bring all the past to a close. There is a shock and a crash, as of a gate flung to behind one by the perfidious hand of fate. Go and seek another paradise, fool or sage. There is a moment of dumb dismay, and the wanderings must begin again; the painful explaining away of facts, the feverish raking up of illusions, the cultivation of a fresh crop of lies in the sweat of one's brow, to sustain life, to make it supportable, to make it fair, so as to hand intact to another generation of blind wanderers the charming legend of a heartless country, of a promised land, all flowers and blessings . . .

He stood in the revealing night'in the darkness that tries the hearts, in the night useless for the work of men, but in which their gaze, undazzled by the sunshine of covetous days, wanders sometimes as far as the stars.

Reading Conrad is perhaps acknowledging two things - (1) The necessary abstinence from venturing into that which is impossible to know, and the necessity of making peace with that impossibility, whether that be the mores and customs of another race or the absurdity of women (Conrad's idea, not mine) (2) The old notion that a lot of work needs to go into making a descriptive sentence, and that it has to be long.

All in all, depending on your attention levels in various paragraphs, your reactions will vary. You'll feel subject to sublime art in some places, and skim over many others. The essence of the stories won't be missed though - promise.