Conrad Joseph
Список книг автора Conrad JosephNostromo, a Tale of the Seaboard - The Original Classic Edition
Conrad is my favorite 20th century author, so I am biased. Compare him to Tolstoy and you are on the money. Both lived lives that gave them fodder for their fiction; Tolstoy as a soldier in the Crimean war, an aristocrat facing the turbulence of the political and social upheavals of fin-de-siecle Russia, and Conrad as a mariner and a Polish transplant who carved out a language and a career for himself in England. <p> Nostromo contains some of the most vividly realized characterization, plot, and sensory detail of any novel ever written in the English language, period. I would also hope that readers do not form their opinions from the BBC film. It is infinitely shallow by comparison to this rich work. While the eponymous character remains purposefully enigmatic, the other inhabitants of Costaguena are stereoscopically fleshed out. We are on intimate terms with the Goulds. We know Decouds innermost thoughts. Its true that Decoud is the central character of this novel. His isolation and mental defragmentation is Conrads arguement for and refuation of existentialism. We are all islands, yet no man is in island. <p> Take your pick. This is a very large piece of fiction. Do not approch it as you would some best seller. Its not going to entertain you on every page. What it will do is reward you in riches that can never come cheaply. Yet it is not like Finnegans Wake, where you have to have your Boedekkers guide to see you along your journey. <p> Its also a great adventure story, with a larger than life hero. If I could suggest one book to represent the most finely crafted novel of its era, this would be it.
Lord Jim - The Original Classic Edition
This is one of those books that anybody who has been through high school should have been exposed to. I remember being assigned this book as a junior or senior and bluffing my way through without really reading it. I even got a literature degree without reading it. Finally, after many years, I felt that I should give the novel its due, and picked up a copy. <p> The novel is the story of Jim, an overly romantic seaman, who during a moment of crisis loses his courage. He is first mate on a pilgrim ship bound for Mecca and after the ship collides with an unseen object and is in danger of sinking, he abandons ship leaving the human cargo to fend for its own. He is dogged by his guilt and spends years drifting around the East trying to find the right occasion by which he might redeem himself. Eventually he ends up in the forests of Malaysia where he becomes a god-like protector of the indigenous people and is given the title of Lord. But no matter how successful Jim might appear to his followers, and to the omnipresent narrator of the novel, he still cannot forget his moment of weakness. Jims self-centeredness prevents him from moving forward with his life and condemns him to a life of voluntary exile, all the time proclaiming that he is not good enough to live in the outside world. He is willing to risk all future happiness and fortune to be able to face his demons once again without losing his nerves. Ironically, it is his last heroic act that destroys all the good that Jim has painstakingly built up, essentially bringing chaos to his Eden like world. <p> Published at the very beginning of the twentieth century, Lord Jim, in many ways anticipated the experimental writing techniques that would be brought to fruition in the works of Joyce, Faulkner, and others. Conrad is not only interested in telling a tale, he is interested in different points of view, nonlinear narrative techniques, and solving the complexities inherent in a tale within a tale formula. Although some readers might find Conrads prose a little tedious, perseverence and careful reading will reveal passages of unexpected beauty that will cause the reader to pause – then slowly re-read.
The Secret Agent - The Original Classic Edition
Joseph Conrads 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, is a difficult little book. Its story is difficult and its characters are largely unpleasant. By difficult and unpleasant, I dont mean to say the novel isnt any good. Far from it. These terms I mean to denote the impenetrability of motive, of sense. The story of a group of anarchists, police, and a family caught in the middle in late Victorian England, The Secret Agent is far from Conrads subtitle, A Simple Tale. The novel, for me, is about hatred, mistrust, and breakdowns in communication. <p> The Secret Agent begins early one morning in 1886. Mr. Verloc, a secret agent for a foreign embassy, who lives in a small apartment with his wife Winnie, her mentally ill brother, Stevie, and their mother. Keeping an eye on a particularly ineffectual anarchist community in London, Verloc pretends to be an anarchist revolutionary himself. As the novel opens, Verloc is called in by his new employer Mr. Vladimir. Vladimir, discontented with the apparent lack of production out of his secret agent, and even further with the lackadaisical English police, wants Verloc to act as an agent provocateur, and arrange for a bomb to spur the English government to crack down on the legal system. As religion and royalty are, according to Vladimir, no longer strong enough emotional ties to the people, an attack must be made upon Science, and he selects the Greenwich Observatory as the appropriate site for action. <p> The novel introduces us to a range of wholly unsympathetic characters. The anarchist collective roughly consists of Doctor Ossipan, who lives off his romantic attachments to women barely able to take care of themselves; The Professor, explosives expert, who is so insecure, he is perpetually wired with a detonator in case he is threatened by police capture; and Michaelis, the corpulent writer, engaged upon his autobiography after a mitigated sentence in prison. Conrads portrayal of this cabal is wholly ludicrous – a band of anarchists that are better at talking than doing anything to achieve their undeveloped goals. No better than these are their nemeses, the London police, here represented by Inspector Heat, who identifies so much with the common criminal element, youd think he was one himself; and the Assistant Commissioner, who is so dissatisfied with his desk job, that he would do anything to get out on the streets – but not so ambitious as to upset his nagging wife and her social circle. <p> As the Greenwich Bomb Outrage is an early, but central moment in the novel, it would not be spoiling anything to tell you that this is where Conrad really earns his paycheck. His mode of bringing all the disparate characters and subplots of the novel together throughout the rest of the book is both reminiscent of and radically undercutting the influence of Charles Dickens in Conrads social critique. The Secret Agent is a clever novel, but exceptionally bleak. Thinking about other early 1900s British novels like Samuel Butlers The Way of All Flesh or Virginia Woolfs To the Lighthouse, Conrads The Secret Agent is another of these works where a British writer tries to assess the state of the Empire in the aftermath of Victorias demise – examining past follies to be overcome, and peering without optimism at what lies ahead.
Heart of Darkness - The Original Classic Edition
Dark allegory describes the narrators journey up the Congo River and his meeting with, and fascination by, Mr. Kurtz, a mysterious personage who dominates the unruly inhabitants of the region. Masterly blend of adventure, character development, psychological penetration. Considered by many Conrads finest, most enigmatic story. <p> This is a high quality book of the original classic edition. <p> This is a freshly published edition of this culturally important work, which is now, at last, again available to you. <p> Enjoy this classic work. These few paragraphs distill the contents and give you a quick look inside: <p> We looked on, waiting patiently?there was nothing else to do till the end of the flood; but it was only after a long silence, when he said, in a hesitating voice, I suppose you fellows remember I did once turn fresh-water sailor for a bit, that we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlows inconclusive experiences.
I dont want to bother you much with what happened to me personally, he began, showing in this remark the weakness of many tellers of tales who seem so often unaware of what their audience would best like to hear; yet to understand the effect of it on me you ought to know how I got out there, what I saw, how I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap.
<p>…At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say, When I grow up I will go there.
<p>…In the course of these confidences it became quite plain to me I had been represented to the wife of the high dignitary, and goodness knows to how many more people besides, as an exceptional and gifted creature?a piece of good fortune for the Company?a man you dont get hold of every day.
<p>…We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders; in and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened into slime, invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us in the extremity of an impotent despair.