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Jan 28, 2012

David rated it:

I picked up a used book last week called 'In Search of Conrad' and found it fascinating. It got me wanting to read Conrad, an author I only dipped into a bit. His books are set in Malaysia, Borneo, Singapore... so I got an atlas out when I was reading this travel book and became fascinated with the area. I’ve almost finished it so I'm starting reading this, based on a true incident mentioned in the book. The original Jim was second mate on a steamer taking 1000 pilgrims from Malaysia to Mecca I More...

0 comments like (5 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Jango rated it:

So much to say about this novel. One one hand it's an adventure tale, but on the other it's a harbinger of the modern novel, told from various points of view, creating an almost cubist vision of one man's struggle with guilt and morality.

The prose is beautiful and the characters fascinating, every one of them plagued by their own inner demons. Jim, himself, is almost a younger version of Kurtz from Heart of Darkness, but my favorite characters were probably Brierly, the forboding More...

0 comments like (8 people liked it)

Nov 22, 2011

Diletta rated it:

Io sono emozionata. A dire il vero no, ma questo libro è stato un parto, come ben saprà chi mi conosce, e finirlo è stata un'impresa a dir poco olimpica.
Inizierei dicendo che ho dato quasi un voto a caso, perché Lord Jim non può avere un voto. Esula totalmente dal concetto di votazione, è un enorme organismo a sé stante che se ne frega altamente di quello che tu pensi di lui. Non gliene importa nulla di annoiarti per pagine e pagine e pagine con imprese piratesche all'assalto di un'isola a More...

8 comments like (4 people liked it)

Oct 30, 2011

Chiara rated it:

“Se n’era andato. La notte lo aveva inghiottito. Mi rimase negli occhi l’immagine di lui, di un uomo impacciato, sconfitto, finito. Era terribile. Udii il sordo cricchiare della ghiaia sotto le sue scarpe. Stava correndo. Stava correndo, vi dico, e non sapeva nemmeno lui dove era diretto. E non aveva ancora compiuto ventiquattro anni.”

Ho iniziato a leggere Lord Jim il giorno stesso in cui ho terminato Moby Dick e debbo dire che la linea di continuità tra i due romanzi continua ad app More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 16, 2009

Archer rated it:

Having read this book, I am still trying to grin more like its characters, with the romanticism of purpose and one's humbleness before it. The book is solidly placed from the perspective of imperialist participation. It asks questions of its participants, and why they travel, why they imbue themselves with honor and the duty of origin. There is a good deal of investigation of the hard issues of dreams and of heart. Also, the end is awesome.

3 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 07, 2011

Rob rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 29, 2008

Anascape rated it:

First, the bad news. In Lord Jim, Conrad launches full-bore into every idea, with a thoroughness verging on overdevelopment. The power of brevity is not explored in his writing style. Choosing realism over poetry, he paints a sharp picture akin to a photograph where other writers may have reached for enigma. But such a tender criticism, it must be said, could only be given to a great work. However, Conrad oddly tries to paint his subject matter as enigmatic using finery and detail, and the More...

1 comment like (3 people liked it)

Apr 20, 2008

bup rated it:

I did this one as an audiobook (but *NOT* the version goodreads implies - they 'combined' editions and the audio version I listened to is gone. It's the version from librivox.org - if you haven't heard of it, but like audio books, I recommend the site - free versions of public domain books).

The version I listened to is downloadable at http://www.archive.org/details/lord_jim_...

Anyhoo, I listened to many sections twice, because my mind wandered, because Conrad can be like t More...

2 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 25, 2008

Andrea rated it:

Jove! This book was ruined by being a story-within-a-story! Sometimes I had to search back and decode the quotation marks to discover whether the speaker was Marlow or Marlow relating something that Jim said. I don't know why Conrad decided to present Jim's story through Marlow, but it really distanced me emotionally from Jim's struggles. This is mostly (barring the end) told by Marlow to a small audience at a distance of some years and I found myself questioning whether he left things out or em More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Oct 30, 2008

Jennifer rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

7 comments like (5 people liked it)

Feb 10, 2012

Paul rated it:

Joseph Conrad is a favorite author.

His way with shaping English (a second language to him, being Polish), is remarkable to this day.

Nobody seems to be entirely clear on the difference between fiction and literature, if any, but this book would seem to be both.

There seem to be two schools of thought regarding stars on goodreads. One is simply "did I personally ~like~ the book". The other is "regardless of my liking, is this a good book".
More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Nov 11, 2009

umberto rated it:

I read "Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad with respect and admiration due to his English writing style with superb narration since he wrote his novels as his third language, a rare genius.
He presented Jim as a man dictated by the unknown fate so he needs to live in the East through moral, psychological and political complexities.
He traveled and stayed in Siam then and spelt our capital, "Bankok" (p. 178) instead of "Bangkok" as used now. I don't know why, mayb More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Jul 18, 2011

Lyn rated it:

I recently finished Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. If you are a serious student of Conrad, you must read Typhoon, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim. Several of the short stories are also excellent.

After reading Lord Jim, a comparison with Heart of Darkness is unavoidable. The two books were published a year apart; Conrad began Lord Jim fi...rst, put it down to write and publish HOD, and then finished the expanded Lord Jim. Much of the tone, themes, imagery and even language are similar if n More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 08, 2011

Alex rated it:

When Conrad's at his best he is one of my favourite authors. Of his novels, Victory is the one I like best, closely followed by Nostromo, and The Secret Agent is up there too. Since Lord Jim is often mentioned in the same breath as those others I was pretty excited to finally find the time to read it. But I was slightly disappointed. While my three favourite Conrad novels, mentioned above, spend several hundred pages carefully building up the details of a painfully tense and tragic climax (to gr More...

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Jul 11, 2010

Jill rated it:

And we're back to painfully slow, brooding, portentous literature with Lord Jim, after the brief respite that was The Secret Agent and a Room with a View. A friend of mine had got my hopes up when he compared Lord Jim to Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. I thought that meant a gripping and well-paced narrative. Turns out he was referring to the story arc of redemption shared by both novels.

In Lord Jim, we find ourselves reunited with Marlow, the narrator in Heart of Darkness. Here, M More...

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Dec 03, 2009

Jennifer (JC-S) rated it:

‘His incognito, which had as many holes as a sieve, was not meant to hide a personality but a fact.’

Jim is a handsome young mate on the Patna, a steamship carrying pilgrims to Mecca. Thinking that the ship is going to sink, Jim and other crew members abandon it. The crew is rescued. The Patna and its passengers are also saved and the perfidy of the crew is thus exposed. Jim is shamed, both by the public board of inquiry into the incident, and because of his failure to act heroica More...

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Aug 04, 2011

Jennifer rated it:

This is a very long story about a young man (Jim) who joins the merchant marines to make his fortune. He is romantic and real life does not meet his expectations, nor do his abilities meet real life. He makes a terrible mistake and loses his certificate that allows him to sail with the merchant marines. He does have a few friends who feel sorry for him and try to help him find work. He finally finds a place, very remote, in the South Seas. He does well there until, again, faced with a choice bet More...

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Nov 11, 2009

Suzanne rated it:

It started off a little slow and confusing but I still liked it. It's sortof difficult to understand at times because the story is told in bits and pieces and the timeline jumps around a bit. It is also very descriptive of everything. I blame this on the genre and the time it was written.

The story is told by Marlow and acquaintance of the main character, Jim, who makes a mistake that causes him to lose his his certification to sail. He is unable to get past his own problems and t More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Feb 06, 2012

Veronica rated it:

Sadly, I just couldn’t get into this seafarer’s tale. Too akin to the recent sinking of the Costa Concordia in Italy? Perhaps, and the eerie similarities between captain and crew abandoning ship were equally disheartening.

For the record, I initially approached Conrad with trepidation for I feared swashbuckling tales of ocean voyagers. My first go at Conrad was The Secret Agent which I really enjoyed followed by the even more delightful Nostromo. Since I enjoyed these lesser known w More...

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Dec 02, 2011

Sam rated it:

This is in some ways an amazing book, and in other ways a tedious book. It tells the story of a young man, Jim, who goes to sea, filled with romantic thoughts of heroic deeds, valor, and manliness. However, events on his journey on the ship Patna soon show him that he is not who he hoped to be. Worse, the whole world knows what happened, and he is unable to live it down, or even leave it behind. (To say more might be a spoiler, but suffice it to say, it is a striking event.)

The f More...

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Jan 23, 2011

April the Cheshire Meow rated it:

I don't know why but Lord Jim somehow echoes Star Wars. Same mythic quality, same romantic dreaming of quest hopefulness and testing of one's mettle until something really bad happens and naive inexperience gives way to heartrending reality. But Star Wars goes on to space opera where Lord Jim is more of a singular man's destiny. Star Wars does not possess any moral uncertainties where Lord Jim accurately reflects the real life play of moral decisions made on the fly that destroy or uplift a pers More...

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Mar 31, 2010

Bruce rated it:

The book opens by describing Jim vaguely, finding him somewhere in the East, a water-clerk at port after port, always moving on once his shadowy past is revealed, eventually ending up somewhere inland in the Indonesian-Malaysian archipelago, living with the natives. This brief situation having been established, the story leaps backward to discuss how Jim came to go to sea, his background and training, how he was injured aboard ship in the East, convalesced ashore, decided not to return to Engla More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Aug 04, 2011

Jim rated it:

I first read this book over 20 years ago, I'm sure it is a different book to me now. You always bring what you've experienced to your understanding of the book. I think this is more true for this book than most in that it seems to me Conrad is questioning/reaffirming what is our moral basis for the way we live our life. He presents Jim as the distillation of living with our actions - and how we can live deliberately with the result afterwards.

As far as "lit-ra-chur" goes, t More...

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Apr 19, 2011

Karl rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

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Sep 15, 2009

Don rated it:

Sad to say, I didn't enjoy this book. In fact, I didn't enjoy it so much that I stopped reading after less than a third of it. Chapter 12 starts as follows:

"All around everything was still as far as the ear could reach. The mist of his feelings shifted between us, as if disturbed by his struggles, and in the rifts of the immaterial veil he would appear to my staring eyes distinct of form and pregnant with vague appeal like a symbolic figure in a picture. The chill air of the nig More...

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Mar 02, 2009

Brian rated it:

The book certainly gets off to a slow start, which is in part a function of the device used to deliver a story. The narrator relates the tale of Jim as though by fireside. The initial story is set around an inquest regarding an incident at sea in which our lead character made a poor decision in the heat of the moment, and his humiliation following that decision. I won't relate the incident as it is quite funny.

It is the second half that really took me. It follows the subsequent More...

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Oct 22, 2011

Jill rated it:

Just BLOWS your mind that Conrad's first language is not English. He has a much better command than most native speakers - myself included. He's an amazing author. This is my favorite book of his. I love the adventures and also the character of Lord Jim. This is a very fast, fun, but thought-provoking read.

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jul 29, 2011

PenNPaper52 rated it:

Joseph Conrad's books always involves a ship in some form or another. Lord Jim in my opinion is his most poignant and sharp book. It is also very very long and does become babbling in the middle. Jim starts his career at sea and soon is promoted to higher ranks. Everything is going smoothly until the fated Patna liner in which Jim jumps ship before the passengers thinking the ship is sinking. Unfortunately the ship doesn't sink and Jim and others who had jumped with him are court martialed. He i More...

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Jan 05, 2010

Mark rated it:

Read ebook (on Touch with Stanza) from here: http://feedbooks.com/book/719

Read 1st half on Touch and back half and supplementary materials in a new Penguin paperback. See: http://marklindner.info/blog/2009/12/31/...

Read just about half on my Touch and then while at the Illini Union bookstore during a 30% off sale I noticed a new Penguin Classics paperback for $7. On sale it was $4.90 so I grabbed it and finished the novel in print and then went back and read the introducto More...

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Aug 21, 2011

Alex rated it:

Having visited Southeast Asia earlier this year, I was greatly amused to read Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim" and reflect upon how greatly the world changes in a hundred years. There is little resemblance between modern Southeast Asia and the bygone era of "Lord Jim." The bamboo-walled kampongs have been replaced by steel-girded skyscrapers; the fishing village are now concrete harbors where Wal-Mart super-freighters lay anchored. The days of the White Rajahs are merely faded ink More...

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