9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderfully fascinating, March 14, 2008
Joseph Conrad (born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski - 1857-1924) was a Polish-born English novelist who experienced life in both the French and British navies. He took his rich experiences, and turned them into fascinating, realistic literature about life in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when colossal empires bestrode the Earth.
This wonderfully fascinating book was first published in 1905 (at least that is what my 1926 edition says), and is NOT a novel. The Mirror of the Sea is a collection of autobiographical essays that were originally published as a series of magazine articles. Each essay is about Joseph Conrad's true love, the sea, covering such subjects as landfalls and departures, the nature of captains and officers, anchors, and so much more.
Yes, this book shows Conrad's love of the sea, and is an excellent read, explaining how a ship worked, throughout its career. Indeed, if you are a fan of nautical books, then I must say that you really must read this book - it will give you a true understanding of what the mariners are saying and what they mean.
I really enjoyed this book, and do not hesitate to recommend it.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Escapism, October 17, 2009
When Conrad was struggling with the writing of big fat novels like Nostromo or Razumov (Under Western Eyes), he was suffering. Writing was torture. He needed an escape mechanism, and he also needed money. This edition unites the 2 products of that double motive. The first is a collection of essays about the sea, the second a short autobiographic walkabout.
I like A Personal Record a lot better than The Mirror of the Sea.
With Conrad, fiction beats non-fiction.
An amazon friend's review of a Gide essay collection recently was entitled `non fiction beats fiction'. (Gide was Conrad's French friend in the literary world.)
My opinion on Conrad is: while Gide's fiction may have sunk with time, and his essays may still be floating, with Conrad it is the other way round. His sea fiction has enormous buoyancy, while his essays have a certain leaden quality.
During his struggle with Nostromo, in 1904/5, Conrad wrote, on the side, and by dictation at night (I am wondering about the opportunities involved in that), a series of sketches of autobiographical nature. They were all published separately in newspapers and magazines, and then collectively as The Mirror of the Sea.
The book was a critical success, but it has been shown that it was unreliable as a biographical source. Conrad made things up and misrepresented facts. Which proves my point, he was a fiction writer.
The book is a lament of the lost culture of the sailing ship, and at the same time of a closed chapter of his own life. He had quit the sea for the life of a writer on land, and it was a hard life, the writing.
JC says in his own introduction: I have attempted here to lay bare ... the terms of my relation with the sea. ... for twenty years I have lived like a hermit with my passion! ...Within these pages I make a full confession not of my sins but of my emotions.
So, he goes and writes, at times entertainingly, about landfalls and departures, anchors and wrong language (casting!), drinking captains and presumptuous mates, storms, pleasure sailing, the ethics of craftsmanship, ships in calamity (overdue, missing, stranded, lost), the near mystic relation between man and ship (a she!), between man and nature, about river estuaries, ports, docks, about Nelson and Trafalgar and about some stories from his youth... This is an easy process for Conrad, compared to the hard labor of his fiction. The writing did not require his usual meticulous composition; the voice is that of a TV documentary host. The texts are assembled without subtitles, and in a sequence which is different from the publishing chronology.
Is it worth it? For me and for other members of the fan club, sure. For aficionados of the subject, i.e. ships and the sea, certainly. For others, hardly.
Now the Personal Record is another matter entirely. JC wrote it for his soon to be former friend F.M.Ford, who wanted to start a new magazine and publish literary autobiographies. JC's text focuses mainly on two subjects: his escape from Poland for the sea, which meant moving to the West, and his escape from the sea for writing as a living. Interestingly, he denies explicitly that the question why he chose to write in English is a legitimate question at all. After all, what else could he have done?
We follow different episodes involving the growth of Almayer's Folly, his first novel. We follow JC on a visit to Poland to his relatives and hear a lot about the family history back to Napoleon and about the uncle, who had adopted JC when his parents had died.
Why did he `run away' to the sea after all? He was a reader from childhood on. He likens his escape to the exodus of Don Qijote from his village in La Mancha: the romance of adventure.
Now, honestly, does that amount to a `Personal Record'? Critics at the time were annoyed. Not only was the text absolutely no record of anything, rather a rambling discourse which jumps through chronos like we love it from Conrad's fiction. Well, some of us do. I do.
Conrad anticipated some opposition. He quotes Marcus Aurelius asking for heroic truth. He makes a categorical statement: JC's truth is more of the humble kind.
And anyway, another quote, now from Novalis (not so beloved by me): I will believe myself as soon as I find somebody else who believes me. (Maybe that's less a quote than a free interpretation.)
As I said, Conrad was great at fiction, his fiction beats his non-fiction hands down. Lucky for us, he was no fanatic of bare facts.
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