Customer Reviews

The Nigger of the `Narcissus' and Other Stories (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Both 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.

Conrad's fine prose is marred by countless printing errors in this Digiread version. Frequent missing characters and even whole words interfere with the pleasure of reading and demonstrate Digiread's lack of concern for quality.

Originally published in 1897this book is considered to be the turning point in Conrad's career. The book has also been published under the title The Children of the Sea: A Tale of the Forecastle.

This is a very good short novel. It has strong characters, great navel insight and is a study of the character of men. It also has to do with the lives of men in general - the good, the bad, and the indifferent.

In an interesting way it weaves a tale of deceit that becomes a reality. James "Jimmy" Waits, a west Indian black sailor waits for illness and is waiting for death.

It explores not only the deceits of men, but how man deals with illness and death in confined space. It was an excellent read.

I would warn other Amazon customers to avoid purchasing this book. Not only is it full of typographical errors, I have the distinct impression errors were made in reproducing some of the dialogue! This is quite evident in the Narcissus short story. Quite honestly, the book appears to have been done very quicly and on the cheap. Corners were definitely cut to make this price point! I would recommend you purchase a version by another publisher.

This was one of Faulkner's favorite stories--one he would re-read every year, according to his biographers. In my opinion, Narcissus is one the key texts that Faulkner's own style is derived from (Proust seems like another inspiration). There are passages in Sanctuary and Light and August, for example, that read as if they have been lifted from Conrad's lost drafts of Narcissus.

Just my two cents. This is a great, lyrical work worth reading.

... for a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement like me, and the issue of Joseph Conrad's racism will have to be addressed later in this review, but not until I've sung the praises of his heroic prose. Not prose, actually! Poetry, since this 100-page novella is the most vivid evocation of life at sea, of the sea in its fury and its placidity, in all of literature -- more vivid even than Patrick O'Brian or Captain Marryat or even Herman Melville. The crew of the Narcissus endure both raging storm and starving calm in their disastrous home-bound cruise from the Orient to England, with only one loss, one man wrapped in sailcloth and fed to the sea.

The "Narcissus" is as dense as poetry also, both allusive and elusive. You can read it as a grittily realistic adventure tale, or as a metaphysical poem of unfathomable depth. I chose to read it both ways. The adventure is a tale of misery and terror, while the little sailing vessel is half capsized in a sea of monstrous waves; like most adventures, it's something to laugh and brag about...after it's over. The metaphysical poem centers on the identity of James Wait, the man of color (if I typed the alternate word here, amazon would squeamishly suppress this review) who boards the ship at the last minute and who declares that he is ill unto death as soon as the ship leaves port. His presence, and that of the sour malcontent Donkin, nudge the crew toward mutiny as well as heroism. That crew is a colorful bunch, a diverse and well-individuated sampling of humanity; depth of character is Conrad's epic theme.

And now the delayed question: why is James Wait a black man? I'm not gonna answer, amigos, just tease you with speculations. Is his race just incidental, in that Conrad was drawing on personal or anecdotal experience in which the 'original' happened to be black? That wouldn't be a terribly satisfying answer, would it? So then, what might James's blackness have meant to Conrad?

He was certainly a 'man of his times' in believing in the superior destiny of the white race, or more specifically the Anglo-Saxon race. His hymn of ecstasy upon beholding the cliffs of England reveals much: "She towered up immense and strong, guarding priceless traditions and untold suffering, sheltering glorious memories and base forgetfulness, ignoble virtues and splendid transgressions. A great ship! ... A ship mother of fleets and nations! The great flagship of the race; stronger than the storms, and anchored in the open sea."

Or was Conrad merely using Wait's race casually, on the assumption that suspicions of sloth and deceit would be more believable attached to a black man? The racism of Conrad's era was erected on such assumptions of racial inferiority, such heedless stereotyping prejudice.

Or was blackness as much a poetic synecdoche for Conrad as whiteness was for Melville and his whale? And did they represent the same thing, the vast indifferent force of nature, of everything outside oneself waging constant warfare against one's survival?

The identity of the narrator is always a critical issue with Joseph Conrad. This tale churns along as a simple on-the-scene narrative; there is so little presence of an explicit "first-person" narrator that one tends to forget his anonymity. In fact, the point-of-view is more often "we" than "I". Yet at the end, the narrator reveals himself as a member of the crew, a curiously bland and inactive member. Was he there all along? Did he ever speak out? Take nothing for granted, friends. Conrad is a wily devil of a writer.