About this title: LORD JIM, Conrad's powerful tale of an idealistic young man and the moment of weakness that determines the rest of his life, explores the nature of innocence, courage, and heroism. It includes an episode from Conrad's own life, in which he was injured by a falling spar while serving as a first mate on the "Highland Forest", and hospitalized in Singapore
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Wildside Press
Date Published: 10/2003
ISBN-13:9781592244133ISBN:1592244130
Description: Fine Like New, Unread, not previously owned. May show signs of wear including remainder marks or stickers on book or cover. Trade paperback (US). Glued binding. 332 p. read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: The Modern Library, New York
Date Published: 1931
Description: Good in good dust jacket. Good, In good dust jacket. 3 p. L., v-vii, [1], vii-ix, 417 p. 18 cm. "First Modern library edition. " read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: The Modern Library, New York
Date Published: 1931
Description: Good. No dust jacket. Highlighting/underlining. Signed by previous owner. G/NW 1931? Dated 1964 by previous owner @philabooks: booksellers. 3 p. L., v-vii, [1], vii-ix, 417 p. 18 cm. Modern library of the world's best books.. "First Modern library edition. " read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Bantam Books, New York
Date Published: 1963
Description: Good. No Jacket. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. The book is very solid with lightly browned pages. The cover is aging with minor shelf & edge wear. read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet Classics, New York
Date Published: 1962
Description: Very Good. No Jacket. 12mo-over 6¾"-7¾" tall. The book is very solid with bright, unmarked pages. The cover has minor shelf & edge wear. The spine has a sticker at the bottom. read more
"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 night seemed to lie on my limbs as heavy as a slab of marble."
Sheesh. At that point I had had enough. The story is actually quite interesting, but the writing is just too sophomoric. The constant striving for ever deeper depths, the failure to throw an occasional bone to the reader about who the heck is narrating now. Overall, too much art, not enough fun."
"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, maybe it was what he heard Siamese people speak like that. As far as I know, he liked to stay at the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok and his name has been honored as the Conrad Room there."
"One of those books so beautifully told that the craft of writing deserves more accolades than the plot and ideas it expresses, Lord Jim satisfies the marks of a great Victorian novel: intriguing and sophisticated ideas and reflections to share and a profoundly beautiful way of doing so that makes the melodramatic plot, characters and dialogue seems almost natural.
The novel follows a young English seaman whose precipitous flight from disgrace in the West leads him to glory and power in a remote village in the Indonesian archipelago. Although the plot drags at times, particularly while Jim is drifting from job to job, the character provides an interesting perspective on the interaction between individual dispositions and external events. Conrad is not innovative in making Jim a romantic man; but Jim's conscious suffering at the hands of this idealism sheds light on the nature of the limitations humans create for themselves.
But what stands out from this novel is that Conrad can write. I read through this novel in awe at his exceptional use of narrative modes. The story is for the most part told chronologically by Marlow, a narrator at once objective and subjective, both omniscient and with limited knowledge. Marlow, who readers know from Heart of Darkness, shares the story late one night with a group of other men familiar with the sea. Yet Marlow's first-person narrative incorporates quotes and hear-say from others who have come into contact with Jim. He readily admits that each of these sources are by nature unreliable. In another brilliant trick that gives the climax a mood more fit for an epilogue, Conrad abruptly shifts to an epistolary mode in which we find ourselves reading a letter from Marlow. The enormous effort and talent that went into weaving these fractuous narratives into the voice of one man, revealing his own prejudices and those of others while simultaneously relaying facts with an authoritative voice, creates an epistemological challenge that grabs readers' interest and gets their minds working. It is a narrative genius on par with Nabokov's Pale Fire yet published two generations earlier."
"Lord Jim is an incredibly frustrating book. It's part imperial adventure, part psychological study, in the vein of Joseph Conrad's most famous work, Heart of Darkness. However, whereas Heart was brief and elegant, Lord Jim is a repetitive slog. I spent as much time trying to figure out who was telling the story as I did actually enjoying the story.
The book tells of the eponymous Jim, who is a mate aboard the merchant ship Patna, which is carrying hundreds of Muslim pilgrims. Mid-voyage, the ship has engine trouble, and then starts taking on water. A squall is coming. The captain and crew is convinced that the Patna is going to sink. They are equally convinced that telling the pilgrims of this fact will start a panic resulting in all their deaths. So the brave captain and his hearty men depart the ship in a lifeboat. Jim follows suit.
The only problem: the ship doesn't sink. Later, it is towed into harbor, with no loss of life. The crew of the Patna, Jim included, go on trial before the shipping board. Eventually, he loses his sailing certificate. Of all the men, only Jim seems ashamed. And he is really ashamed. I mean pathological. Most of this book is devoted to his all-consuming wallow.
The story is told in typical Conrad fashion, by which I mean it utilizes every contrivance known to LOST. The first section of the book is written in the third-person. This was my favorite part. It was fast-moving, uncluttered, and clear. Then Marlow, the loquacious raconteur from Heart of Darkness shows up and starts spinning his story. Apparently recovered from the jaundice he got searching for Kurtz, Marlow is in the mood to talk. And talk. And talk. He's the quintessential drunk uncle on Thanksgiving. Long after everyone else has fallen asleep watching the Dallas game, he's still there, wine in hand, telling you the same thing for the fourth time.
This was my first view of Jim. He looked as unconcerned and unapproachable as only the young can look. There he stood, clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on...
The next roughly two-thirds of the book is told in first person by Marlow. This section utilizes nested dialogue, so that Marlow will be relating a story in which a person within that story is also relating a story. (The number of unreliable narrators in Lord Jim is astounding). When you look at a page, you see a mass of quotation marks. It all gets very confusing. Just to make it more confusing, every once in awhile the book will jump back to third-person. Then the book ends with a letter(!) written by Marlow to an unnamed man who'd been listening to the original story.
It was the nested dialogue that did me in. There's really no reason why you have to use quotation marks as Marlow tells his story. It would've been much simpler to just shift the book from third to first person while Marlow talks, instead of working Marlow's extended monologue into the third-person format, requiring the use of quotation marks inside quotation marks. For whatever reason, Conrad is insistent on jamming these essentially first-person narratives into third-person. This choice wasn't a big deal in Heart of Darkness because the framing device was much simpler: start by introducing Marlow; Marlow tells his story; end with Marlow finishing story. In Lord Jim, it's a much bigger problem, because the narrative is jumping all over the place. There are stories told within stories; at times it's like opening a Russian nesting doll. There are dozens of tangents and digressions and trying to keep straight who's doing the talking - whether it's Marlow or Jim or some other characters - requires constant attention.
I was also disappointed by how repetitive this book was. Marlow takes an interest in Jim, for reasons I can only surmise (old man obsessed with young man...oh I'll just stop), and tries to get him a job. Jim takes the job, does a good job, then quits whenever the Patna is brought up. So Marlow gets Jim another Job, Jim does a good job...etc.
Finally, Marlow, through the help of his friend Stein, finds Jim employment on the island of Patusan, in the Malay Archipelago. Here, Jim becomes a benevolent Kurtz and earns his honorific "Lord." He falls in love with a mixed-race girl named Jewel, becomes friends with Dain Waris, a chief's son, and generally seems content (though he will never stop brooding about his moment of cowardice, to the point where I wanted to slap the taste right out of his mouth). The finale comes when a buccaneer named Gentleman Brown invades Patusan and Jim shows that a man's character is indeed his fate.
There are parts to like about Lord Jim. Conrad is a great writer, and it almost goes without saying that if you read this book, you will find masterful descriptions, colorful imagery, and incisively wielded similes.
Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with the progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light exactly at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her at noon, pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteriously into the sea evening after evening, preserving the same distance ahead of her advancing bows...The awnings covered her deck with a white roof from stem to stern, and a faint hum, a low murmur of sad voices, alone revealed the presence of a crowd of people upon the great blaze of the ocean. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, as if falling into an abyss of ever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and smoldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity. The nights descended on her like a benediction."
We guarantee every item's condition, as described on Alibris. If you are not satisfied that an item is as described, return your purchase for a refund.
rating
