 So, there's one fairly explicit commentary on Marxism, and it comes after Mr. Verlach finishes meeting with his friends and just finds them unsatisfactory for this sense of urgency that Mr. Vladimir put in him by threatening to withhold the money. He drew them, this is Mr. Verlach, he drew them with a certain, or he compares himself to his friends, he drew them with a certain complacency because the insight of conventional respectability was strong within him, being only overcome by his dislike of all recognized labor. This is a great defender of labor. Only overcome by his dislike of all recognized labor. A temperamental defect which he shared with a large proportion of revolutionary reformers of a given social state. For obviously one does not revolt against the advantages and opportunities of the state, but against the price which must be paid for the same in the coin of accepted morality, self-restraint, and toil. The majority of revolutionists are enemies of discipline and fatigue mostly. There are natures too whose sense of justice the price extracted looms up monstrously enormous odious oppressive, worrying, humiliating, extortionate, intolerable, those are the fanatics. The remaining portion of social rebels is accounted for by vanity, the mother of all noble and vile illusions, the companion of poets, reformers, charlatans, prophets, and incendiaries. Yeah, I read that a whole bunch of times over and over. Now I guess what interested me was the very explicit engaging of Marxist ideas in this book, but that's certainly not the bulk of the book. One piece of advice that I got, perhaps one of the best pieces of advice I got when I was a writing student, came from the great Marilyn Robinson, and she said that oftentimes when somebody has a really strong idea that they believe in very strongly, they just write really simple and not very good literature because they just write simple characters to illustrate a point. I think this is a criticism which might may apply to Anne Rand's writing, good philosophy, mediocre literature, because they don't do justice to the richness and complexity of the human experience. Now with the main characters, Joseph Conrad certainly does flesh them out fully even when they're up to no good, and the main characters are Mr. Verlach's family. He starts, in a lot of modern fiction, the plot just kind of pushes, the words just kind of push the plot along, really on the surface, just people do this, do that, they move like robots, but Joseph Conrad's description starts really deep, he starts writing all the way down at their soul about all the consciousness and all the impulses and all the prejudices, and that all kind of, there's just this huge force that behind the actions that we see on the surface. And I want to end by just reading a little bit about Stevie who's very well rounded out his psyche. They go on a cab ride and here's the Stevie's observation of the cabbie. The cab man looked at the piece of silver which appearing very minute in his big grimy palm symbolized the insignificant results which reward the ambitious courage and toil of mankind, whose day is short on this earth of evil. He had been paid decently for one shilling pieces and he contemplated them in perfect stillness as if they had been the surprising terms of a melancholy problem. The slow transfer of the treasure to an inner pocket demanded much laborious groping in the depths of decayed clothing. And then there's a wonderful bit of interaction between him and Stevie. Stevie was staring at the horse whose hind quarters appeared unduly elevated by the effect of emaciation. The little stiff tail seems to have been fitted in for a heartless joke. He talked to Stevie of domestic matters and the affairs of men whose suffering are great and immortality by no means assured. I'm a night cabbie I am he whispered. I've got my misses and four kids at home. The monstrous nature of the declaration of paternity seemed to strike the world dumb. A silence reigned during which the flanks of the old horse, the steed of apocalyptic misery smoked upwards in the light of the charitable gas lamp. So Stevie observes all this. This circumstance strengthened his conviction immensely, but also augmented his indignation. Somebody he felt ought to be punished for it, punished with great severity, being no skeptic but a moral creature. He was in a manner at the mercy of his righteous passions that's him excited about the suffering in the world that he's always very sensitive to. Not unlike William Faulkner's retarded character, mentally handicapped characters in almost everything he writes. So just more about Stevie. Like the rest of mankind perplexed by the mystery of the universe, he had his moments of consoling trust in the organized powers of earth. And maybe I'll end the book review, my book report right there. I encourage you to be skeptical of consoling trust in the organized powers of earth. And I welcome all criticism and commentary. I'll also post a list of new words on the words that I learned. I tend to write them in back of the book, see, so to help improve my big vocabulary, my very big, big, good, big, good vocabulary. That's all. Stay tuned for more.