On rereading..............................

I spent ten days in the pulmonary ward, while the fever turned into pneumonia.  A flood of intravenous antibiotics eventually got on top of it, but meanwhile the problem of boredom loomed.  I staved it off by rereading Lord Jim, a copy of which, along with the usual epics about swords and dragons, was on the library cart which a very sweet and obviously fulfilled senior female volunteer was wheeling around the wards.  More than half a century ago Lord Jim had been one of the set novels for my first-year English class at Sydney University, and I remembered it as a boring book.  I suppose I had a plan to stave off one kind of boredom with another, as a kind of inoculation.
   On the strength of this long-delayed second reading, the book struck me as no more exciting than it had once seemed, but a lot more interesting.   I had long known Conrad to be a great writer:  on the strength of Under Western Eyes alone, he would have to be ranked high among those English writers - well, Polish writers resident in England - who, dealing with eastern Europe, analyzed the struggle between the imbecility of autocracy and the imbecility of revolution.

-Clive James,  Latest Readings