Product Description
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's fictional account of a journey up the Congo river in 1890, raises important questions about colonialism and narrative theory. This casebook contains materials relevant to a deeper understanding of the origins and reception of this controversial text, including Conrad's own story 'An Outpost of Progress,' together with a little-known memoir by one of Conrad's oldest English friends, a brief history of the Congo Free State by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and a parody of Conrad by Max Beerbohm. A wide range of theoretical approaches are also represented, examining Conrad's text in terms of cultural, historical, textual, stylistic, narratological, post-colonial, feminist, and reader-response criticism. The volume concludes with an interview in which Conrad compares his adventures on the Congo with Mark Twain's experiences as a Mississippi pilot. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

"Mistah Kurtz--he dead." An influential work on five 20th century seminal works
I read this book for a graduate Humanities course.Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind.Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough.Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book.Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie.After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane!I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story.Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain.High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.

Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.

Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur, his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle.Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).

I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now.There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave.T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand.The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough.Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!

As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.

... Read more

Product Description
Lord Jim is a novel by Joseph Conrad, originally published in Blackwood's Magazine from October 1899 to November 1900.
The central occurrence of Lord Jim appears to be based on true events. Although Conrad never confirmed this, there seems to be too much similarity for mere coincidence. On 17 July 1880, S.S. Jeddah sailed from Singapore bound for Penang and Jeddah, with 778 men, 147 women and 67 children on board. The passengers were Moslems from the Malay states, traveling to Mecca for the hajj (holy pilgrimage).

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Shorter sea stories from Conrad, published together in 1902: Typhoon, Amy Foster, Falk, and To-Morrow. ... Read more

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Conrad's second novel. ""An Outcast of the Islands" is my second novel in the absolute
sense of the word; second in conception, second in execution, second as it were in its essence.There was no hesitation, half-formed plan, vague idea, or the vaguest reverie of anything else between it and "Almayer's Folly."The only doubt I suffered from, after the publication of "Almayer's Folly," was whether I should write another line for print.Those days, now grown so dim, had their poignant moments.Neither in my mind nor in my
heart had I then given up the sea. In truth I was clinging to it desperately, all the more desperately because, against my will, I could not help feeling that there was something changed in my relation to it."Almayer's Folly," had been finished and done with.The mood itself was gone.But it had left the memory of an experience that, both in thought and emotion was unconnected with the sea, and I suppose that part of my moral being which is rooted in consistency was badly shaken..." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

...the second white mans grave in Sambir
"I know the white man...in many lands have I seen them, always the slaves of their desires..."
This is Conrads second book and like his first it deals with the colonial enterprise but in this book white men are their own worst enemies. The native Malay characters are given more in the way of identity in this book and they are seen as having complex views. There is intrigue in this book as white men from different nations try to assert their dominance in the region but the Malays too have a plan and that is to take advantage of the whites aggressive and competitive natures and set them against each other. Great plot. But Conrad also gives you each characters story and each character is always more interesting than whatever role they are playing in the overall plot. One of the most attractive and elaborated themes in this book is the one of mans place in nature and mans own nature. The beauty of the tropical locale is made even more attractive and alluring by the women who walk through the foliage like "apparitions" veiled in "sunlight and shadow".Conrad describes the forests, the light in the tree tops, and the shadows on the forest floor and all nature is seen as metaphor for mans own dualities and incongruites. A much matured writer from Almayers Folly. The plot is simpler than Almayer was but thats good. The simpler plot allows Conrad more latitude to deal with the individual characteristics and that is certainly one of Conrads strengths. He sometimes overdoes it with the repeated use of words like inscrutable and the always heavy darkness, and his overall view of man seems dim, as man in his eyes is an only partially lit(enlightened) being. To Conrad man remains a lost creature for the most part who just by chance or luck or ill omen gets caught up in events he cannot fully comprehend. A limited resource man may be but while reading it is hard not to see it his way. The summing up scene at the end of the book with a drunken Almayer(who also appeared in Conradsfirst book, the Almayer of Almayers Folly) relating the now long passed events of the book to a traveling and equally drunk botanist is an excellent closing comment on the continued folly that is the colonial enterprise and man in general. ... Read more

Product Description
This Kindle book includes: almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Isalnds, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, the Inheritors, Typhoon, romance, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Secret Sharer, Under Western Eyes, Chance, Victory, The Shadow Line, The Arrow of Gold, and The Rescue.According to Wikipedia: "Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-born English novelist. Many critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in the English language—a fact that is remarkable, as he did not learn to speak English fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a strong Polish accent). He became a naturalized British subject in 1886. Conrad is recognized as a master prose stylist. Some of his works have a strain of romanticism, but more importantly he is recognized as an important forerunner of modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino and J. M. Coetzee. Conrad's novels and stories have also inspired such films as Sabotage (1936, directed by Alfred Hitchcock, adapted from Conrad's The Secret Agent); Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979, adapted from Conrad's Heart of Darkness); The Duellists (a 1977 Ridley Scott adaptation of Conrad's The Duel, from A Set of Six); and a 1996 film inspired by The Secret Agent, starring Bob Hoskins, Patricia Arquette and Gérard Depardieu. Writing during the apex of the British Empire, Conrad drew upon his experiences serving in the French and later the British Merchant Navy to create novels and short stories that reflected aspects of a world-wide empire while also plumbing the depths of the human soul."

Responding to customer feedback, I improved the formatting of this file on 7/3/2009.If you bought a copy before that that, you should be able to download the new version at no additional cost. Feedback always welcome. seltzer@samizdat.com ... Read more

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This collection includes: Falk, One Day More, To-morrow, Notes on My Books ... Read more

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The first book-length study to specifically examine the many intersections in the works of Robert Louis Stevenson and Joseph Conrad, this volume extends the focus of current debate beyond the writers' South Seas literature. Considering Stevenson and Conrad's shared literary history and experience of Victorian London, it examines their convergence of styles in the emergent modernism of the fin de siècle, their romance and adventure modes, their fictions of duality, and their exploration of the human psyche.
Moreover, the book recuperates Stevenson's reputation as a serious writer, not only as Conrad's antecedent and influence but as a writer equally worthy of study in these shared modes. ... Read more

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He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and
he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders,
head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think
of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed
a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It
seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself
as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate
white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got
his living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular.

A water-clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the sun,
but he must have Ability in the abstract and demonstrate it practically.
His work consists in racing under sail, steam, or oars against other
water-clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting her captain cheerily,
forcing upon him a card--the business card of the ship-chandler--and
on his first visit on shore piloting him firmly but without ostentation
to a vast, cavern-like shop which is full of things that are eaten and
drunk on board ship; where you can get everything to make her seaworthy
and beautiful, from a set of chain-hooks for her cable to a book of
gold-leaf for the carvings of her stern; and where her commander is
received like a brother by a ship-chandler he has never seen before.
There is a cool parlour, easy-chairs, bottles, cigars, writing implements,
a copy of harbour regulations, and a warmth of welcome that melts the
salt of a three months' passage out of a seaman's heart. The connection
thus begun is kept up, as long as the ship remains in harbour, by the
daily visits of the water-clerk. To the captain he is faithful like a
friend and attentive like a son, with the patience of Job, the unselfish
devotion of a woman, and the jollity of a boon companion. Later on the bill
is sent in. It is a beautiful and humane occupation. Therefore good
water-clerks are scarce. When a water-clerk who possesses Ability
in the abstract has also the advantage of having been brought up
to the sea, he is worth to his employer a lot of money and some
humouring. Jim had always good wages and as much humouring
as would have bought the fidelity of a fiend. Nevertheless, with
black ingratitude he would throw up the job suddenly and depart.
To his employers the reasons he gave were obviously inadequate.
They said 'Confounded fool!' as soon as his back was turned. This
was their criticism on his exquisite sensibility.

Download Lord Jim Now! ... Read more

Product Description
This book focuses on Conrad's Malay fiction and the way in which it deals with cross-cultural encoutners, cultural identity and cultural dislocation. Issues of race and gender are to the fore. There are a number of books which deal with Conrad and Empire, but Robert Hampson's book carves its own niche by taking the arguments of others further.
... Read more

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A dying sailor casts a pall over the other crew members of the Narcissus, as it sails home to London from Bombay. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (7)

Conrad at sea!
This book was titled "Children of the Sea" in the American edition. It's a quite good book, some what the form of it falls in between a novel and a shortstory. It tells the tale about the rough life at sea on a ship with sails! It's moving to hear about these sailors out on open sea, their lives depend on eachother, then they reach the destination and split up never to see eachother again. Perhaps the most memorable part of the novel is when the ship enters the dirty dark industrial city of London, after life at the merciless but fresh sea, Conrads description of London is almost Dickens like in its somber visions.

I agree, it's an interesting but not amazing reading
The nautical setting is interesting: Recognizable to those familiar with sailing, a learning experience for those of us who are not. One star.

The characters are interesting: Ranging from hardend sailors with strong work ethics to unpricipled slackers, with a mysterious black shipmate (who may or may not be faking illness) thrown in to shake them all up. One star.

What I didn't find interesting was Conrad's writing style. His descriptions contained far too many confusing similes, his run-on sentences and three-page paragraphs were tiresome, and his sudden switch from third-person to first-person narration was a bit bewildering. No stars.

Interesting, Not Amazing.

I came across Narcissus as a reference to one of Faulkner's inspirations in writing As I Lay Dying.As the latter book was superb, I suspected the former would perhaps shine as brightly.I was definately wrong.

It's not that the book is bad--certainly not.But the book, as a story, isn't all that riveting, and as a social commentary is not anything that most haven't seen time and again (that Conrad's work came before much of what we've seen is, of course, of some merit).

From an academic standpoint the book is probably worth a read.Historically, it's clearly important as it effectively captures the mood of an era long past.As a study in literature I found Conrad's employment of seamless shifts between the first and thrid person as subtle and deceptively powerful--clearly this is where Faulkner borrowed style from the work.

The sea of another time
Joseph Conrad provides a memory from life of the sea in the waning days of square-rigged ships.How far that age is gone is illustrated by the rebuilt Constitution.When she was gotten out in recent years after her reconstruction she really wasn't put under full sail--you couldn't assemble a crew to do so in the USA.

Conrad suggests he was among the crew but at other times assumes the stance of an omniscient observer (as when he reports that conversation between Donkin and Jim Wait in the closed deck house).Yet he does this in other novels and I can live with it for the reward of his evocation of the sea--at least I think it's a realistic evocation of the sea, I who have voyaged only in air conditioned cruise ships and a small inland sail boat.

More important than Conrad's nautical narration is his penetration into the psyche of nearly everyone on board.The first customer reviewer was wrong to say that "the loathsome Donkin" stands for the crew and to align the novel with political literature.A great humanistic work cannot be demeaned to the status of a political analysis, at least this one can't.

The last pages of the novel are as melancholy a picture of the vanished men of a dead age as I can imagine.They have undergone three fates (except for Donkin, who of course succeeds):death at sea, death by land, and transfer to a steam vessel, the latter equated with a sort of death.

Even the material remnants of that age are fragmentary and unsatisfactory, a few ships in dock as museum specimens and the great East India docks transformed to the trendy "Docklands" development.

Conrad's first masterpiece
I read this in one sitting on a very dark skied rainy afternoon in an attic which looked like the interior of a ship and I was riveted by it, truly amazed by this tale which was at least in part based in fact. Conrad had written a couple of minor novels and some stories before this but this was his first masterpiece and remains his best tale of the sea, though he wrote other good ones none of them approach the power of this one. There is not only a great telling of a perilous holding-on-by-the-skin-of- your-teeth tale of a ship in peril but also a figure on board whose presence has an unsettling effect upon the men. While the ship sails on calm waters the crew and captain all appear to us as individuals only united by the fact that they all walk on the same decks, they are seen as unique presences and they all have their own reaction to the strangers "condition" which is an apparent illness. As the storm approaches and the ship and crew begins its stunningly told fight for life the individuals all merge as it were into one entity sharing the common task of sailors versus the sea. As the men try to save the ship the strangers presence is forgotten and the captain himself is mysteriously quiet as the men simply do what they must to survive the storm. Once the ship is no longer in peril the uneasy balance of personalities resumes and once again the stranger is suspect. Fascinating and exciting story. Elements of both mystery and high adventure combining here to give one not only a wildly enjoyable read but one which leaves ones mind opened in some way. Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim were Conrads next efforts, but don't miss this one. The prologue to this has Conrad setting down his artistic credo but read it only after the tale is told. That way your mind can absorb in its own way this excitingly told tale. ... Read more

Product Description
Though others have published reminiscences of Joseph Conrad, these accounts have frequently contained inaccuracies, sometimes even simple fabrications. It is partly in an attempt to set the record straight that John Conrad, the novelist's only surviving son, has committed these memoirs to print. Mr Conrad has not tried to import into the book the biographical interpretations or speculations of others, but rather to recall and set down as honestly and directly as possible what he remembers from around 1909 to the point of his father's death in 1924. Through his vivid and detailed account of the day-to-day existence in the various houses the family inhabited during this period, Mr Conrad is able both to throw light on many aspects of his father's life and to invoke the sense of an era of English social life which has now disappeared. His memoirs are informal, often anecdotal, recording what amused, irritated or moved his father. ... Read more

Product Description
New texts of Joseph Conrad's modern classic 'The Secret Sharer' and of two other tales appear in this edition of 'Twixt Land and Sea with numerous words, sentences, and entire paragraphs restored from Conrad's manuscripts and typescripts. Written while he was working on Under Western Eyes, these stories, when collected together in 1912, marked the turning point in Conrad's professional fortunes that Chance would soon confirm. Published for the first time as Conrad meant them to be, these authoritative texts are accompanied by a new Introduction that discusses their sources, composition, and publication, and their reception up to our time. The Notes explain nautical, geographical, and historical references and are supplemented by diagrams, maps, and other illustrations. A textual essay and apparatus examine the revisions, excisions, divisions, and censorship the tales underwent, which till now have been reflected in editions unduly trusted by countless readers. ... Read more