Word: conradian
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...sexual charisma, either. The three of them head off on a boat to find a few dolphins. Sexual tension piles up, and myriad facts about the wondrous history of the Indian swampland are learned by all. Just when you think Piya and Kanai and the silent, brooding, vaguely Conradian Fokir will wander up and down the swamp forever, tigers begin to appear along the swamp, warning you that a climax is coming; it arrives in the form of a cyclone that sweeps the archipelago and kills one of the main characters...
Critics have blamed Gallant for not judging more, for not smiling on the good, or frowning on the bad more overtly. In truth, she mostly keeps her feelings protectively compressed behind an almost Conradian irony. Children, servants, old people draw her affection, partly because they are in a better position than the strong or successful to understand the real condition of life: that it is vulnerable to mysterious sudden changes, controlled by powers that the subject does not understand. Imaginative arrangements must be made, all of them temporary. "Gabriel at that time," Gallant writes about a young refugee in France...
Like all major artists, Joseph Conrad was a cartographer of the imagination. He imposed color and boundaries on an unclaimed mindscape; when he was finished, certain images and sensations became forever Conradian. Unlike his sedentary fellow writers, though, Conrad roamed widely in fact as well as fancy. His career as a young seaman took him to exotic places, and the cargo of perceptions he brought home sustained him as an aging author. His travels outward were then mirrored by his journey inward. Once, Conrad had chugged laboriously up the Congo River to reach the heart of darkness; later he realized...
...selfish souls. Partisans of all stripes will argue that Naipaul has maligned their ideologies: not all revolutionary leaders are pathological perverts, not all benevolent whites are deluded do-gooders. These cavils are as irrelevant as they are true. Guerrillas is not a polemic (polemicists will be annoyed) but a Conradian vision of fallibility and frailty. With economy and compassion, Naipaul draws the heart of darkness from a sun-struck land...
...saved. Unless, of course, you're a Sinner. In this movie sin means, say, staying after work to have sex with your secretary. The connection between adultery and hellfire has never been more firmly drawn in a modern setting. Meanwhile, upstairs in the penthouse, we learn a Conradian lesson--that if men in a dangerous situation act together, under the obvious leadership of men like Steve McQueen, they will be saved; but if they resort to the every-man-for-himself law of the jungle, they will die a horrible death...