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GiordanoBrunoPost at 2010-4-14 11:14 | Only View Author

[Books] Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics)

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Book Details

  • ISBN-10: 0199536023
  • Paperback: 400
  • ISBN-13: 978-0199536023
  • Publisher: OxfordUniversityPress,USA(June15,2008)
  • Language: English
  • Book Dimensions: 7.5x5.1x1inches
  • Shipping Weight: 9.6ounces

Book Editorial Reviews:

Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics)--- Product Description
Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman--"as unflinching as a hero in a book"--who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from an eastern port. His life is ruined: an isolated scandal has assumed horrifying proportions. But, then he is befriended by an older man named Marlow who helps to establish him in exotic Patusan, a remote Malay settlement where his courage is put to the test once more. Lord Jim is a book about courage and cowardice, self-knowledge and personal growth. It is one of the most profound and rewarding psychological novels in English. Set in the context of social change and colonial expansion in late Victorian England, it embodies in Jim the values and turmoil of a fading empire. This new edition uses the first English edition text and includes a new introduction and notes by leading Conrad scholar Jacques Berthoud, glossaries, and an appendix on Conrad's sources and reading.

About the Author

Jacques Berthoud previously edited Conrad's Almayer's Folly
and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'
for OWC




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Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics) Reviews:

Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics) About [Books] Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics) by GiordanoBruno's review
A Grand Ungodly Godlike Narrator

A Grand Ungodly Godlike Narrator, November 22, 2008
By Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews

That title is a knock-off of Ishmael's description of Captain Ahab in Melville's Moby Dick. My guess is that Joseph Conrad never read Moby Dick. His writing career unfolded during the decades before the rediscovery of Melville. I have no doubt that Conrad would have burst with appreciation if he'd encountered the other "greatest" writer of sea tales in English or any language. Lord Jim begins to remind me of Moby Dick in chapter four, when the straightforward 3rd person narrative suddenly shifts to Conrad's typically indirect narration in the first person voice of Captain Marlow. Thereafter, Jim's whole adventure is embedded in Marlow's rambling discourse, to the utter despair of high school sophomores and middle-age armchair travelers who "just want the story, ma'm."

So who is Marlow? Is he just a convenient mask for Conrad? Why is so much text devoted to Marlow's musing about his own "peripheral" role in the story and his own unresolved understanding of Jim? Does "Jim" really exist, outside of Marlow's penchant for entertaining friends with bizarre anecdotes? (The last few chapters, cast as a letter from Marlow to a friend, would seem to be intended to 'document' the truth of the tale.) Dear reader, you've better notice that Jim is remarkably inarticulate in Marlow's account; when he speaks, he almost never finishes a sentence, never establishes a discourse on his own terms. The Jim we get to know is as much a projection of Marlow's ego as Jesus of Nazareth was of the Apostle Paul's. And then, of course, we still have to wonder about the invisible author behind the so-obtrusive narrator.

What I'm arguing here is that the novel Lord Jim is about as much about the title character as Moby Dick is about the whale. Ahab's quest for ineffable vengeance by death is almost exactly parallel to Jim's quest for redemption by death. Both are ripping good adventure tales that COULD be told in eighty-page novellas or made into films from which the narrative voices are stripped and scattered on the floor of the editing studio. But just as the main character in Moby Dick is Ishmael, Marlow is the heart of obscurity in Lord Jim. To really relish either book, the reader has to take the narrator's epiphanies seriously.

Are we on any kind of solid ground in saying that Melville's novel is about a socially orphaned Ishmael projecting his need for a father Ahab? Shall we then risk the notion that Conrad's novel is about a psychologically impotent Marlow projecting his need for a son on Tuan Jim? Hey, reader! If you steal my notion and write a grad seminar paper with it, don't forget to vote "helpful" on my review!

This is an absurdly great novel, a book to read thoughtfully with mounting involvement until you can't attend to anything else before finishing it, a book to read again and again as your life changes perspective on itself. If you have doubts about Conrad's mastery of the English language, listen to this description:
"... we watched the moon float away above the chasm between the hills like an ascending spirit out of a grave; its sheen descended, cold and pale, like the ghost of dead sunlight. There is something haunting in the light of the moon... It is to our sunshine, which -- say what you like -- is all we have to live by, what the echo is to the sound: misleading and confusing whether the note by mocking or sad." That extended metaphor, to my mind, sets up perfectly the mood and the narrative thrust of Marlow's first long 'confessional' conversation with the disgraced sailor Jim, in which self-mockery and sadness afflict both parties.

I'd forgotten, or never realized, how deep this novel is, since I first read it perhaps twenty years ago. I hope I can come upon it with the same freshness and astonishment when I read it again, perhaps twenty years from now.

 

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[Books] Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics) Rating:8 Points
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K_S_ZieglerPost at 2010-4-16 21:51 | Only View Author
About [Books] Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics) by K_S_Ziegler's review
Youth, Romanticism, and Fate
Like other reviewers I was introduced to this book at a young age. Although I was too young to understand much, it intrigued me then as it intrigues me now - this prototypical theme about one who leaves the numbing monotony of uninspired domestic life for the romanticism of going to sea and distant lands. Certainly, the romanticism of youth and then the subsequent disillusionment of experience, in this case a bitter twist of fate, was a subject of grave concern for Conrad, and that concern is sounded in the powerful language that comes out through the narrator Marlow. As Marlow relates, "There is a magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven each of us to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures... in no other kind of life is the beginning all illusion - the disenchantment more swift - the subjugation more complete". Or this: "Yet you, too, in your time must have known the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone - and as short-lived, alas." Stein, the merchant and butterfly collector had an enigmatic answer to this romanticism: "in the destructive element submit."

Of interest here is the historical context within which this book was written.It appears as if an actual historical incident, the abandonment by the crew of the British ship Jeddah carrying pilgrims bound for Mecca in 1880, serves as a basis for the story. It was during a time when Great Britain had amassed a great overseas empire and had come to dominate the trade routes to the East; and also when racist attitudes abounded, supported by the science of the day.At one point, Marlow pauses in his narrative to wonder if all this enterprise into foreign lands could have arisen solely out of greed, and cannot come up with any other motives other than to benefit loved ones back home.

Jim's downfall has a great deal to do with the fringe characters that cross his path. None of the crew of the Patna seem to be anything but self-indulgent and self-serving;exactly the kind of people one would expect to run for their lives rather than face a responsibility for something larger than themselves. It was Jim's fate as a youth to suffer the inaction of being pulled along with these cowards. Marlow went out of his way to extend his sympathy to Jim, seeing in him a different sensibility, as "one of us". But then again, although it's not exactly clear - "obscured in mists" as Marlow would say, he had something in common with that crew. He seems to have had his head in the clouds, thinking about his own adventures rather than his duty to the passengers. Later, when he is banished to Patusan and becomes a revered figure to the natives there and is on his way to redeeming himself and finding love - at least in that one corner of the world -he crosses paths with two outcasts, the egomaniac pirate Gentleman Brown and the abject Cornelius. Then a twist of fate...

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DanielMyersPost at 2010-4-19 08:29 | Only View Author
About [Books] Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics) by DanielMyers's review
Ah! he was romantic, romantic.

Lord Jim is one of the few books that one finds it necessary to reread at least every decade or so.I suppose most of us are introduced to the classic Marlow-narrated books when one is quite young.And one feels the same sort of deep ambiguity in reading the novella Youth, the longer Heart of Darkness and the even longer Lord Jim.- Also, one has perhaps begun to doubt the greatness of a writer whose THIRD language was English. - Let it be said: It is always reaffirmed.The "unreliable narrator" ambiguity herein is the subject of many a dissertation.I'm not covering it here because there is always - it has always struck me - a deeper ambiguity.With whom does the reader identify?Which character captures his/her imagination?It has become almost a truism that one comes to identify with the older Marlow as one ages rather than be captivated by the subjects of his stories: the younger Marlow in Youth, the mad Kurtz or the idealistic Jim.The catch lies, of course, in the fact that this older narrator is himself captivated by his younger doppelganger, in some form.I suppose one might dub it the transitive property of narration.That is to say, you perhaps identify with Marlow now, but Marlow is fascinated with "X", ergo, you are still fascinated with "X," only removed, like Marlowe, by your own life experience.

Right.Why is Marlowe, why does the reader become so fascinated with Jim?I think primarily because, as Marlow continually intones throughout the book: "I only knew that he was one of us." - Meaning many things, but primarily for the reader, that his soul is a noble tabula rasa embarking on life before experience and defeat have crippled his idealism.It's not as simple as the question of "lost illusions" - for one thing Jim never loses his - It's more the question of whether they are illusions in the first place.As Stein (my personal favourite character herein) says:

"A man that is born falls into a dream like a man that falls into the sea."

The novel is ultimately asking us what, if anything, is real.Marlow says of his last visit to Jim on Patusa:

"It was a strange and melancholy illusion, evolved half-consciously like all our illusions, which I suspect only to be visions of some remote unattainable truth, seen dimly."

The power of Conrad's writing is nowhere more apparent than when in posing this question:

"It is when we try to grapple with another man's intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun.It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp."

As we stretch out the tendrils of our imagination towards Jim and Marlowe throughout the book, we, like them, are continually dogged by, well, life.Conrad doesn't proffer any answers to the complex issues to which the book gives rise.As Marlow addresses the auditors of his story:

"You may be able to tell better, since the proverb has it that the onlookers see most of the game."

In other words, the reader must find his or her own way on the high narrative seas.But it would be disingenuous of me not to reveal what kept coming back to this reader, as it does to Marlow - Those words of Stein:

"Ah! He was romantic, romantic."

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ScoraPost at 2010-4-21 19:06 | Only View Author
About [Books] Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics) by Scora's review
Difficult book, but one of my favorites
This is a fascinating book. Although it is difficult to understand, if one reads carefully and even discovers the basic plot, it is an incredibly rewarding experience. When I first read it I didn't know whether I should laugh or cry. I recommend this book to anyone who read Heart of Darkness and is interested in the further adventures of the philisopical and self-reflective Marlow. This is an awesome book.

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BillR_MoorePost at 2010-4-24 05:44 | Only View Author
About [Books] Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics) by BillR_Moore's review
Great and Darkly Compelling on Many Fronts

Lord Jim is Joseph Conrad's most popular novel and possibly his best, which truly says much. A dark tale of human frailty with profound psychological insight, revolutionary narrative techniques, and sublime prose, it is essential for fans of Conrad and classics generally.

The most immediate and lasting feature is probably the dense portrayal of the title character, one of literature's most memorable tragic heroes and most fascinating character studies. What makes him so engrossing is that he in many ways has great potential - he certainly has enough strength and determination to be a successful, even admirable leader - yet somehow embarks on a downward spiral leading to bleak death. He is the essence of Conrad's dark vision - average in many respects and extraordinary in some but burdened with a character flaw that leads to his demise. As in much of Conrad, there is a strong fatalistic streak. Jim never would have thought himself capable of the act that led to his ruin, others would have thought it equally impossible, and he is unable to understand it himself while regretting it bitterly - yet it happened. Conrad's real claim seems to be not that it was fated but that humans are inherently frail and that individual flaws will come out in even the most staunch given the right situation - which only the truly lucky avoid. It is easy to condemn Jim, but Conrad was never one to take an obvious moral route, depicting him with characteristically thought-provoking ambivalence. The narrator cannot deny his act's essential despicableness but sees that Jim still has much worth. One of Conrad's great artistic strengths is that he gives much food for proverbial thought but never sinks to the heavy-handedness so common in many other heavy writers and nearly always fatal. Jim is shown from several angles with astounding verisimilitude and piercing psychological perspicuity, but it is up to us to judge him and all he stands for - if we can. Even the harshest cannot deny his essential humanity, which is what makes him so compelling; loathsome as he conventionally is, we recognize the tempestuous darkness beneath his impressive exterior because we have seen it in ourselves. Conrad made a career out of exposing this darkness, and this is a prime example.

The ground-breaking and highly influential narrative structure is nearly as notable. The novel began serializing in 1899 and came out in book form in 1900, which is very appropriate since it is in many senses a bridge between the centuries' literature. Elevated language and a historical background tie it to the nineteenth century, but its techniques are distinctly Modernist. Lord is indeed one of Modernist literature's very first examples, far closer in narrative spirit to its wildly experimental novels than to Conrad's Victorian contemporaries. It is told from various perspectives, primarily via a long story by Marlow, familiar from "Heart of Darkness" and other Conrad works. Nested dialogue abounds, and there is also narrative in letter form as well as other complex methods. This multi-faceted approach is fascinatingly wide, giving a grand view of the proceedings. It can be hard to follow, especially as it is far from linear, but I strongly encourage anyone struggling to persevere. As nearly always in such cases, it becomes easier, and the threads come together in the end - indeed spectacularly, if catastrophically, so. Conrad's deft handling of these complicated devices is truly admirable - a difficult artistic feat pulled off with rare acumen.

The novel is notable for many other reasons, not least its intriguing peek into a world of sea adventures that is now near-unimaginable. The glimpse of Eastern cultures nearly unknown in the West even now is particularly noteworthy, and the ongoing contrasts between East/West, white/non-white, etc. are dramatized vividly and skillfully. Those with historical interest in the era or place will be particularly invigorated, but the sociological value is at least as high. We learn much about how Victorian society - and of course Conrad, though his style as ever makes it dangerous to draw sweeping conclusions - thought of such cultures and vice versa. This aspect of Conrad's fiction initially overshadowed more important ones, but we can now appreciate them in proportion.

As always with Conrad, the prose is also of great significance. He is one of English's great prose stylists, which is truly incredible considering that it was his third language. This has some of his most lyrical and sublimely beautiful writing, whether describing exotic landscapes or the darkness at humanity's heart. The prose is indeed so great that it is one of many reasons making this often difficult read worthwhile.

Neophytes would be better off starting with Conrad's more accessible short stories or relatively approachable novels like The Secret Agent, but anyone alive to his fiction - or great literature of any kind - must stop here eventually.

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amazonbuyerPost at 2010-4-26 16:21 | Only View Author
About [Books] Lord Jim (Oxford World's Classics) by amazonbuyer's review
A Big Disappointment
Many years ago I saw the movie 'Lord Jim' with Peter O'Toole and I thought it was a great flick with a lot of depth and very thought-provoking. It is one of my favorite films. So, I thought I would read the book since I've often found books to be even better than the movie. But, in this case I was sorely disappointed. The book, to me, was very hard to read with exceedingly long sentences and paragraphs and written almost in a 'stream-of-conciousness' mode as told by a third person. I found this to be true of Conrad's 'Nostromo' as well and have to admit that I failed to finish either book because of the cumbersome writing style. Perhaps, I am not smart enough to understand the writing style. In any case, may advice is to watch the movie which I found to be much more enjoyable.

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