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Youth; Heart of Darkness; The End of the Tether (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

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Youth is the story of a young marine officer, taking his first big trip, from England to the Far East. His ship is the Judea, an old ship, continously beset by calamities. The ships motto 'Do or Die' also fans the romantic flames of the young first mate.
The captain, the first mate and the ship reach, despite all misadventures, the Gulf of Bengal, where final misfortune befalls them, their cargo, coal, catches fire and the ship is doomed.
The story is set in the twilight days of the old sailboats. It is romance against the future, but it is also the romance of youth against the wisdom of age. Everyone who once has felt the pulse of adventure in his blood, everyone who once longed for the beckoning adventures of the magical East and of the Sea, will find himself in this book.
And pitty on whoever cannot relate to this book.

Placing these three novellas together was indeed a touch of brilliance. They form a natural trilogy, and happily, 'Youth' is the first in the series as it is to my mind the most profound, hauntingly, and beautifully written. It is a coming of age story of sorts, a brilliant one that operates on many levels: thematically, linguistically, symbolically, and logically to form a mediation on the changes of the peception towards life one goes through as one ages--the trope is brilliant, a man of 45 looking back on a time when he was 20, and realizing that the adventure he THOUGHT he had, was really a comedy of errors populated by bad luck and incompetent sailors. The writing is a bit elegaic, but the narrator is extremely clever--providing a 'meta-analysis' of his own jaded life now in relationship to his 'gee whiz' youth. It also raises a very interesting question. Is it better to maintain those 'positive illusions' of youth--living life with fond memories when everything was new and exciting (deluded by one's inexperience) or better to be 'wise' to the ways of the world, so you can function more efficiently albeit in a machine-like fashion? Perhaps in Conrad's day, this occurred faster, but nonetheless, it is an eternally relevant story and brilliantly and beautifully written. About HOD, enough has been said. Of The End of the Tether, the title says it all: What is the natural progression here? We start off with 'Youth' go to the 'Heart' (of the matter), and finish up with being at 'The end of 'our' Tether.' It doesn't get much better than this as far as literature is concerned.

Conrad is the master tale- teller of English Literature. In this volume three stories, from three Ages of Life are included. The first 'Youth'is about a maiden vogage to sea, and the last "The End of the Tether" about an old man in his blindness. The story however which has been most written and thought about, and is considered one of Conrad's masterpieces is " Heart of Darkness".
It begins as a meditative reflection, a telling on the banks of the Thames to his friends by the veteran seaman Marlowe of a tale of exploration and disaster. He tells of a voyage into the heart of Africa in search of an enlightened European adventurer and merchant Kurtz . Kurtz has dealt in the deepest part of the jungle in trading in ivory. But what Marlowe comes to discover and see is someone who has seen into ' the heart of darkness' and dies crying out ,"The Horror, the Horror". Marlowe returns to Europe and civilization and tells Kurtz's fiancee that Kurtz's last words were her name.
But the tale is more than the story or the plot. With Conrad the meaning of the tale is the creation of the atmosphere and the meditation on the voyage throughout .It is in a kind too of bringing us into another whole mode of being in thinking about our lives.
" The heart of darkness" to the uncivilized African reality and it refers to the deepest recesses of the human soul, a soul which crosses through and transcends continents.As Conrad's great Literature does.

I first read "Youth" in my own youth, over 25 years ago. It has haunted me ever since. That it is difficult to describe why is, I believe, more a testament to Conrad's subtle skills than to my own undoubted incompetance as an expositor. On one level, "Youth" is little more than a tale of a ill-fated sea voyage, but its poignancy is unmatched by any work of short fiction I've ever come across. Good or bad, pleasant or horrific, our youth is what we all miss. The inclusion of this great novella and the magically exotic "End of the Tether" ought to be more than justification enough to buy this book--even if it didn't also include the justly famous, if sometimes obscure, "Heart of Darkness". No one should think he or she is familiar with Joseph Conrad who has not read all of these three wonderful tales. (If you can find a collection that also includes "The Nigger of Narcissus," even better.)

The stories in this tidy collection have stuck with me like toasted cheese on a plate. My love for the movie Apocalypse Now lead me to look into this and I couldn't let it go. I won't bother recounting any of the story, my wish is simply that a few more readers infuse this literature into their lives.

The only thing missing is "the nigger of the Narcisscus", but you can't have everything. As complex as "the heart of Darkness" is, you may be better served by starting this book with "The end of the Tether", it is great in its apparent simplicity, yet it has its own complexity.

The three long stories in this volume include two of Joseph Conrad's most familiar - Youth & Heart of Darkness - which have been detached anthologized and assigned to high school lit classes ad nauseam, but in fact the three were published together in 1902 under the title "Youth: a Narrative, and Two Other Stories." Conrad scholars maintain that the author originally intended "Lord Jim" to be the third of three tales told in the voice of Captain Marlow, but that Lord Jim got too massive on its own account, necessitating the substitution of "The End of the Tether," a classic third person narration. "Youth" marked Marlow's debut as a narrator within a narration, relating his own first great adventure to a small circle of friends, one of whom is the nameless author, presumably Conrad himself; thus we get a first-person framework around an extended quotation of a first-person yarn. One has to wonder if readers in 1902 were daunted. If so, they had NO idea how involuted Conrad's narrative structures would become, beginning with Heart of Darkness, and reaching an apogee in the later novel "Chance." The barest explanation for Conrad's increasingly indirect style of narration is that he couldn't accept his own authorial omniscience, that he needed a kind of vivid uncertainty and contingency in order to portray the reality of human existence as he felt it. Even the straightforward narrative of The End of the Tether requires the artful withholding of a key piece of information until the story is three-quarters told. (Warning: Do NOT read the intro, or any other reviews, or even the blurb on the back cover before reading The End of the Tether!)

Despite the absence of Marlow from the third and longest story, nonetheless, this collection has important qualities of structural unity. 1. All three stories are set on steam ships. 2. The first and the last report horrendous accidents in which the ships sink. 3. Most important, the three stories represent the three stages of an adult man's life: youth, midlife, and old age. You can translate those three stages into the language of psychologist Erik Erikson, as "confidence vs avoidance", "certainty vs confusion", and "serenity vs despair." More or less, anyway; Conrad is anything but reductionist.

"Youth" is a gripping tale of the testing of a young man's mettle, a headlong rush of a story that shouldn't need any analysis, but critics have tormented every line of it for hidden meanings and fracture lines. Marlow's occasional interruptions of his narration, to say "Pass the bottle," have been teased into post-modernist assaults on Conrad's latent discomfort with his surrogate's sentimentality. Huh? "Pass the bottle" is Conrad's translation of the old Viking toast: SKULL! Any son of the baltic Sea would take it as such. And believe you me, "Youth" is Conrad's purest Viking saga!

"Heart of Darkness" could just as easily be titled "Heart of Obscurity." It is obscure as well as dark, a tale of insanity and brutality with no heroic redemptive margins. It begins with Marlow once again yarning to his friends, aboard a ship on the Thames, about an ordeal -- to call it an adventure would be misleading -- as the captain of a river steamer in the Belgian Congo. Marlow's reminiscences are stimulated by his thoughts of the impression the Thames would have made on the first Romans who invaded Britain as civilizers. That brief revery sets ups Conrad's agonizing descriptions of the corruption of modern colonialism, specifically in Africa. "Mr. Kurtz" is only one of the civilizing monsters in this story, though his figure has received the most critical scrutiny. There are also the odious company agent and his nephew, the ragamuffin Russian 'explorer' who idolizes Kurtz, and Marlow himself. And there's a cast of "African masks" - semi-naked savages so incomprehensible that they seem more like carved idols than actual humans. Last, least, but urgently significant, there are two women ostensibly attached to Kurtz, one white and one black. Teachers! Please! Don't assign this story to your classes! Let the students find it for themselves! I know it's a powerhouse, a veritable treasure cairn of ambiguity, but it's too intimidating. The reader should need a special chauffeur's license before driving in that darkness.

It must have come as a relief to the readers of 1902 to confront the reassuring virtues and dignity of Captain Whalley, the intrepid but superannuated hero -- yes, Hero! -- of The End of the Tether. A famous seaman in the days of sailing ships, Whalley has come upon poverty and irrelevance in his later years. His single remaining purpose is to provide for his only child, a daughter married to a fool and cripple in Australia, whom he hasn't seen in years. To do so, he enters a bizarre partnership with a despicable half-crazy engineer who happens to own a rust-bucket steamer. But Captain Whalley has a secret.... (and that's why you shouldn't read any spoilers; this is surely the only Conrad story that depends on the reader's surprise for its effect.)

I have just a few more Conrad novels to read or re-read and review now, after a year or so of exchanging thoughts about this Titan of literature with other readers, particularly H. Schneider, via amazon. I'll be sorry to finish. Conrad is unique.

Make sure you read the short story "Youth," as well as the "Heart of Darkness." Both are super, and youth is worth it for the following lines alone:

"And there was somewhere in me that thought: By jove! This is the deuce of an adventure--something you read about; and it is my first voyage as second mate--and I am only twenty--and here I am lasting it out as well as any of these men, and keeping my chaps up to the mark. I was pleased. I would not have given up the experience for worlds. I had moments of exultation. Whenever the old dismantled craft pitched heavily with her counter high in the air, she seemed to me to throw up, like an appeal, like a defiance, like a cry to the clouds without mercy, the words written on her stern: "Judea, London. Do or Die."

O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattle-trap caring about eh world a lot of coal for a freight--to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trail of life. I think of her with pleasures, with affection, with great--as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her...pass the bottle."