After a year of false starts, I finally admitted I just couldn't get into this book. It's strange because I've loved a lot of Conrad's work, and I certainly see the same beauty of writing here, but this one just wasn't grabbing me. I don't know if it's the slower pace than most of his (but his other relatively long books also start slowly), that he was writing further outside his experience than usual, or that I've changed and some of the troubling things about Conrad now bother me more than they used to.