I don’t recognise this passage: perhaps someone can identify it in Conrad’s work? It sounds more like Joyce to me (Gabriel’s internal monologue at the end of ‘The Dead’). This is the story of her life in a sentence. She ‘brooded’ over this and thought deeply about it then someone called her, she put it down, and never picked it up again.
Some people go skimming over the years of existence to sink gently into a placid grave, ignorant of life to the last, without ever having been made to see all it may contain. It’s highly significant that she becomes absorbed by this novel, and she broods over a particularly pertinent passage, which states that 102 is called ‘Joseph Conrad’, but the novel Mrs Bridge reads in this 2-paragraph segment is never identified. It consists of 117 short chapters, each with a title, often enigmatically tangential to the content for example, ch. Largely as a result of the novel’s inventive form, style and structure, and the brilliant use of language. As I was reading Mrs Bridge, Connell’s debut novel, first published in the US in 1959 (but which began life as a short story published in The Paris Review in 1955), I wondered whether he was avoiding a similar fate. Reviews of Murakami’s new novel Colorless Tsukuru have commented on the dangers of making the protagonist a dull character: this can lead to a fitful narrative.
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