The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record (World's Classics) [Paperback]

Joseph Conrad (Author), Zdzislaw Najder (Editor)

Book Description

Series: World's Classics | Publication Date: January 12, 1989

The Mirror of the Sea offers, in Conrad's own words, "a very intimate revelation...of my relation with the sea." This imaginative piece of non-fiction passionately explores ships and their captains, storms, oceans, and all other aspects of a sea-going life that Conrad experienced for twenty years. A Personal Record, Conrad's autobiography, provides invaluable insight into the thoughts of a writer whose experience of repression in Poland and whose love and knowledge of the sea formed a basis for his novels and tales of adventure.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Offers a tantalizing glimpse of the great modernist's early life: his family background...and the twenty years he spent as a merchant seaman."--The Guardian

"This work and Conrad's fiction 'interpenetrate': along with Najder's introduction, Mots and APR are indispensable to understanding Conrad's fictive maritime imagination."--R.D. Madison, U.S. Naval Academy

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was born into a Polish family who lived in the Ukraine. At the age of sixteen he went to sea, and later joined the British Merchant Navy, becoming a Master Mariner and a British citizen in 1886. After twenty years at sea, he came to live in England, where he wrote many famous novels, including Lord Jim, Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, and The Secret Agent. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (January 12, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0192817299
• ISBN-13: 978-0192817297
• Product Dimensions: 7.2 x 4.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,003,629 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Prose Poetry, January 21, 2007

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Annapolis Bookstore LLC "Annapolis Bookstore" (Annapolis, Maryland, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Mirror of the Sea and A Personal Record (Hardcover)

For anyone with a love of sailing and the sea this is a wonderful book, Joseph Conrad's prose when he is at his best is pure poetry. "The tall masts are the pillars supporting the balanced planes that, motionless and silent, catch from the air the ship's motive-power, as it were a gift from Heaven vouchsafed to the audacity of man; and it is the ship's tall spars, stripped and shorn of their white glory, that incline themselves before the anger of the clouded heaven." I have been fortunate enough to have been the master of a square rigged ship, though nothing like that which Conrad had sailed upon as the sailing ship era was coming to a close, and for me he truly captures something magical about this long gone era, its ships and men and the moods of the oceans upon which they sailed.