Lord Jim (Signet Classics (Paperback))

published	2000 by Signet Classics
first published	1900
binding	Paperback
isbn	0451527674 (isbn13: 9780451527677)
pages	352
description	When Lord Jim first appeared in 1900, many took Joseph Conrad to task for couching an entire novel in the form of an extended conversation--a r...more [close] When Lord Jim first appeared in 1900, many took Joseph Conrad to task for couching an entire novel in the form of an extended conversation--a ripping good yarn, if you like. (One critic in The Academy complained that the narrator "was telling that after-dinner story to his companions for eleven solid hours.") Conrad defended his method, insisting that people really do talk for that long, and listen as well. In fact his chatty masterwork requires no defense--it offers up not only linguistic pleasures but a timeless exploration of morality. The eponymous Jim is a young, good-looking, genial, and naive water-clerk on the Patna, a cargo ship plying Asian waters. He is, we are told, "the kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge of the deck." He also harbors romantic fantasies of adventure and heroism--which are promptly scuttled one night when the ship collides with an obstacle and begins to sink. Acting on impulse, Jim jumps overboard and lands in a lifeboat, which happens to be bearing the unscrupulous captain and his cohorts away from the disaster. The Patna, however, manages to stay afloat. The foundering vessel is towed into port--and since the officers have strategically vanished, Jim is left to stand trial for abandoning the ship and its 800 passengers. Stripped of his seaman's license, convinced of his own cowardice, Jim sets out on a tragic and transcendent search for redemption. This may sound like the bleakest of narratives. But Lord Jim is also touching, elevating, and often funny. Here, for example, the narrator describes the ship's captain (proving that clothes do indeed make the man): <blockquote> He made me think of a trained baby elephant walking on hind-legs. He was extravagantly gorgeous too--got up in a soiled sleeping suit, bright green and deep orange vertical stripes, with a pair of ragged straw slippers on his bare feet, and somebody's cast-off pith hat, very dirty and two sizes too small for him, tied up with a manilla rope-yarn on the top of his big head. You understand a man like that hasn't a ghost of a chance when it comes to borrowing clothes. </blockquote> This is formidable prose by any standard. But when you consider that Conrad was working in his third language, the sublime after-dinner story that is Lord Jim seems even more astonishing an accomplishment. --Teri Kieffer [close]
date added	02-01-07 edit book

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Matthew rated it:

(review of isbn 1551111721)

05/17/08

There's a certain school of novel-writing I've always loved, which thrived around the beginning of the 20th century. It's a style characterized by narrators who are trying to recount a story that they understand only incompletely and who piece together bits of hearsay, guesses, and a few scraps of first-hand knowledge, into a narrative about some largely-mysterious third party. The general format goes: "X was an extraordinary person who I hardly knew, but here is my attempt at recounting th...more There's a certain school of novel-writing I've always loved, which thrived around the beginning of the 20th century. It's a style characterized by narrators who are trying to recount a story that they understand only incompletely and who piece together bits of hearsay, guesses, and a few scraps of first-hand knowledge, into a narrative about some largely-mysterious third party. The general format goes: "X was an extraordinary person who I hardly knew, but here is my attempt at recounting their history."

This novelistic approach seems to have fallen into disfavor -- maybe because it doesn't provide sufficient opportunities for navel-gazing on the part of the narrator, or maybe because, by necessity, it lends itself to narratives which are incomplete and ultimately open-ended. But these shortcomings can also be virtues, insofar as they echo how we experience stories in everyday life (partially, in disconnected pieces) far more elegantly than most PoMo or stream-of-consciousness efforts at narrative self-awareness and naturalism, without any of the look-at-me pyrotechnics which are often confused these days with literary talent.

Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence is probably the preeminent example of this literary style, but Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad comes in a close second as the novel's narrator -- a retired sea-captain -- recounts the career of Jim, an extraordinary, and extraordinarily flawed, young man.

In addition to its stylistic merits, Lord Jim may be the most perfect depiction of a romantic hero that I've ever come across. Conrad's grasp of the aspirations, shortsightedness, and appeal of the romantic (we're talking Byron here, of course, not Danielle Steele) is dazzling. He writes:

"Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word — the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. The heaven and the earth must not be shaken, I suppose — at least, not by us who know so many truths about either."

Here, in a nutshell, is the romantic hero and the death of romanticism that comes with maturity. A tour de force that perfectly exemplifies Conrad's gift for seamlessly combining literary and psychological sophistication with swashbuckling action and pure storytelling....less

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Lord Jim (Signet Classics (Paperback))

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