Showing posts with label penguin classics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label penguin classics. Show all posts

The Nigger of the '"Narcissus": Typhoon Amy: Foster: Falk: Tomorrow Review

The Nigger of the 'Narcissus: Typhoon Amy: Foster: Falk: Tomorrow
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The Nigger of the '"Narcissus": Typhoon Amy: Foster: Falk: Tomorrow ReviewBoth previous reviewers of this edtion have focused on the title story, the 'Narcissus', which could be called a short novel or a long story. Fair enough, it is a brillant one with some issues that need discussion.
But don't overlook that this Penguin edition also contains other texts: the equally brillant sea tales 'Youth' and 'The Secret Sharer', and then some more.
'The Lagoon' is possibly the weakest story here. A white man travels in Borneo, stays over night in the house of a Malay friend, on the title lagoon, and finds that the woman of the house is dying of fever. The husband tells his guest the story how he eloped with the woman with the help of his brother, who died in the escape, killed by the pursuers. The death of the woman is seen as heavenly retribution for the desertion of the brother, and now the man will go and take revenge. Not very impressive.
'An Outpost of Progress' is a sarcastic story on the pretensions of colonialism. Two Belgian imbeciles (minor Almayers, one could say) try to run a trading station in the Congo colony and fail in cluelessness.
'The Idiots' is set in the Bretagne, where Conrad picked up the story during his honeymoon. A wealthy and anticlerical farmer gets married, so as to have sons who can inherit. Tragically, the couple is hit with misfortune and the first 3 sons turn out to have some kind of unspecified mental handicap, hence the title. The man gets talked into going to church to confess and pray for healthy offspring, but, as the Doors told us: you can't petition the Lord with prayer. The next child is not only a girl, bad enough, but again not mentally right. The parents are devastated. The man holds it against the woman, he becomes violent and abusive, she kills him in defense, gets rejected by her mother, and commits suicide.
'The Informer'is a brillant prelude to the 'Secret Agent'. We have one of the anarchists, an aristocratic traitor of his class, tell the narrator, a collector of porcelain, the story how he rooted out a police informer in a London terrorist group by faking a police raid. This is by far the strongest among the 'not sea'-stories in this volume.
'Il Conde' is about an aging count living alone in the Naples area, who gets mugged by a young Camorra (ie local mafia) member. A lot of the tension in this story comes from the fact that Conrad steps very carefully around a central aspect: the count probably solicited sexual services from the mugger. We don't know that for sure from the text, though. Conrad picked up this story from a fellow Pole when vacationing in Capri.
'The Duel' is a lengthy semi-farce about two swashbuckling cavalry officers in Napoleon's grande armee. It makes great fun of military codes of honour. The story was filmed with Harvey Keitel and Keith Carradine under the name 'The Duellists'. Amusing, but not much depth here. But you can learn some about the Napoleonic times. (The Poles loved him because he promised them statehood. He couldn't quite deliver on the promise due to the winter campaign disaster, but true love withstands reality.)
If you thought of Conrad only as a seaman, here you have him in a broader spectrum. Not all of it is brillant, but none of it is uninteresting.The Nigger of the '"Narcissus": Typhoon Amy: Foster: Falk: Tomorrow Overview

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Typhoon and Other Stories Review

Typhoon and Other Stories
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Typhoon and Other Stories ReviewTyphoon and Other Short Stories -By Joseph Conrad *****
"She seemed, indeed, to have been used as a running target for the secondary batteries of a cruiser. A hail of minor shells could not have given her upper works a more broken, torn, and devastated aspect; and she had about her the worn, weary air of ships coming from the far ends of the world - and indeed with truth, for in her short passage she had been very far; sighting, truly, even the coast of the Great Beyond, whence no ship ever returns to give up her crew to the dust of the earth." Typhoon
Conrad is a master of observation. His novels and short stories aren't great narratives and dramas so much as they are depictions of the mind and the human spirit. In Typhoon, to be sure, nothing really happens: a coastal ship with a bizarre captain encounters some "dirty weather knocking about" and barely survives. Except for the ending, it's "The Perfect Storm" without the A-List cast.
The relationship between Mr. Jukes, the first officer, and Captain McWhirr, the distant and preoccupied ship's master, is the story, such as it is. The Captain is infuriatingly obtuse, choosing to trust his own judgment rather than the experience of others:
"Captain McWhirr, took a run and brought himself up by an awning stanchion.
"A Profane man," he said, obstinately. "If this goes on, I'll have to get rid of him first chance." "It's the heat,' said Jukes. "The weather's awful. It would make a saint swear. Even up here I feel exactly as if I had my head tied up in a woolen blanket." Captain McWhirr looked up. "D'ye mean to say, Mr. Jukes, that you ever had your head tied up in a blanket? What was that for?" It's a manner of speaking, sir." Said Jukes,Stolidly.
I cite another paragraph of Conrad's simply for the beauty of his language (which, after all, he didn't learn until he was 20 years old):
"The Nan-Shan was plowing a vanishing furrow upon the circle of the sea that
had the surface and the shimmer of an undulating piece of gray silk. The sun, pale
and without rays, poured down leaden heat in a strangely indecisive light, and the Chinamen were lying prostrate about the decks. Their bloodless, pinched, yellow
faces were like the faces of bilious invalids.
... The smoke struggled with difficulty out of the funnel, and instead of streaming
away spread itself out like an infernal sort of cloud, smelling of sulphur and raining soot all over the decks."
Another reviewer has taken other critics to task for panning Conrad's work. I won't bother: it's enough for me to know that Conrad is ranked among the greatest of writers of English. From his novels (Nostromo, Lord Jim) to short works (Heart of Darkness; The Secret Sharer) he is a universally acknowledged master. -Philip Henry
FIVE STARS *****Typhoon and Other Stories Overview

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