It was a sympathetic reading of the man, who died earlier this year.
But Conrad has also been the beneficiary of much tactful and sympathetic reading, especially in America.
But another, perhaps more sympathetic, reading of the sudden ending has been proposed, based on Lucretius' mission.
The exposition of "Lapis Lazuli" and the acute and sympathetic reading of "Meditations in Time of Civil War" are exemplary cases.
The colorful childhood of the Mann brothers, born in the Hanseatic town of Lübeck into an upper-bourgeois merchant family, makes for sympathetic reading, especially given their exotic Brazilian mother.
Even a sympathetic reading of Alceste can't deny his extreme rigidity, or the darkness of his worldview; he has been compared to Hamlet as a truth-teller in a house of deceptive fools.
Faced with the choice, I would adopt a "sympathetic" reading, one which comports with dictates of fundamental justice and recognizes that compassion need not be exiled from the province of judging.
(Though Nero did not "fiddle while Rome burned," it's entirely possible that he strummed the lyre and recited poetry as the city was consumed by flames in 64 A.D). Seneca's tragedies support a sympathetic reading of his life or, alternatively, just complicate things still further.
