Another writer in the same league, writing about the same period (and who coincidentally was also a big admirer of Austen), is Patrick O'Brian. His Aubrey-Maturin cycle, about the 20-year relationship between a British naval captain and his physician, is fantastic. The second novel in the series, "Post-Captain", is something of an homage to Austen.
Read it several years ago -- it's my favorite book. The way the story progresses from the initial setup is masterful. I'm honestly still shocked that Nostromo isn't the first book that people associate with Conrad, given that it's so much more beautiful and thematically-dense than Heart of Darkness or The Secret Agent. It's like if everyone thought Typee was Melville's best work.
I'm not too surprised by that. If you look at what people think on Goodreads, it's pretty polarizing.
It's a slow-moving, difficult book. The approach is almost postmodern in its insistence on subverting established notions of how a book should be structured: There are multiple perspectives; the "protagonist" of the story only shows up about 2/3 of the way; there are a myriad of little detours into brief sketches of characters and histories that are not entirely integral to the story; and so on. At times feel it like Catch-22 in how the narrative keeps undermining its own progress by stopping to describe something apparently inconsequential. The first 100 pages or so are almost entirely establishing exposition.
The prose is also considerably more complicated. I remember making a note of the following, a scene that compares Gould with a statue of king Carlos IV of Spain on a horse:
The weather-stained effigy of the mounted king, with
its vague suggestion of a saluting gesture, seemed to
present an inscrutable breast to the political changes
which had robbed it of its very name; but neither did
the other horseman, well known to the people, keen and
alive on his well-shaped, slate-coloured beast with a
white eye, wear his heart on the sleeve of his English
coat.
It is, at least to me, a sentence that befuddles with its elusive, overly flowery phrasing. I'm still not entirely sure what point is being made. Gould is not open about political leanings? Did he had to make that point while comparing the character to a king on a horse? I mean, I can appreciate the allusions to the remnants of an old regime (physical and frozen in the form of a statue), but I think Conrad is unnecessarily difficult here. Here's another passage that actually made me laugh out loud:
Everybody around him was being robbed by the grotesque
and murderous bands that played their game of
governments and revolutions after the death of Guzman
Bento. His experience had taught him that, however
short the plunder might fall of their legitimate
expectations, no gang in possession of the
Presidential Palace would be so incompetent as to
suffer itself to be baffled by the want of a pretext.
"So incompetent as to suffer itself to be baffled by the want of a pretext"?!
That said, it's of course very much enjoyable, but I can see why many people would find it a slog, especially the beginning. By comparison, shorter works like Heart of Darkness and Youth have none of these issues.
