The Portable Conrad (Penguin Classics) [Mass Market Paperback]

Joseph Conrad (Author)

Book Description

Series: Penguin Classics | Publication Date: November 27, 2007

A great novelist of the sea, a poet of the tropics, a critic of empire and analyst of globalization, a harbinger of the modern spy novel, an unparalleled observer of the moments in which people are stripped of their illusions-Joseph Conrad is one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. This revised edition of The Portable Conrad features the best known and most enduring of Conrad's works, including The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, and The Nigger of the "Narcissus," as well as shorter tales like "Amy Forster" and "The Secret Sharer," a selection of letters, and his observations on the sinking of the Titanic.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is the best one-volume selection of Conrad available. Michael Gorra's learned and acute introduction puts both Conrad, and Conrad criticism, in essential context."
-James Wood

About the Author

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) began his literary writing career after eight years at sea, traveling to the various exotic lands that would become the backdrop of his greatest stories.
Michael Gorra is a professor of English at Smith College and the author of After Empire: Scott, Naipaul, Rushdie. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.
J.H. Stape is the author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad.
Robert Hampson is a professor of modern literature in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Owen Knowles is a research fellow at the University of Hull.
Michael Newton teaches at the University of Leiden.
Allan Simmons is a reader in English literature at St. Mary's College, Strawberry Hill.

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 752 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (November 27, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143105116
• ISBN-13: 978-0143105114
• Product Dimensions: 7.4 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #266,660 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Two Book Length Novels, Three Long Tales, Six Short Stories, September 27, 2001

By 

Conrad B. Senior (Easton, CT United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Portable Conrad (Portable Library) (Paperback)

I was amazed to see that I am the first to review this classic book. I borrowed this book and brought it with me to read while helping deliver a yacht.

The trip was a memorable one, for many reasons, not least among them was finishing "The Nigger in the Narcissus" a story of a dying black man's anger during last days of life aboard a ship, "Typhoon" the story of a steam trapped in a hurricane, and "Youth" the story of a second mate's trip to Asia on a dilapidated ship.

I especially enjoyed the descriptions of the storms in "Narcissus " and "Typhoon".

It is said that truth is stranger than fiction. Conrad's stories may be fiction, but they evoke a sense of realism that no other author manages to capture.

Conrad, a Pole, is arguably the best English writer of all time. His characters are unique and real, and the stories are real world, challenging situations that are unpredictable and yet follow the laws of human nature, and are therefore somewhat more than real.

This book is a nice compact size and print in type that is also easy to read. There is enough material here to carry with you on your voyage, wherever that may be.

If you want to bring only one book with you on your next trip, this would be a good choice.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classic Short Fiction, February 24, 2007

By 

Philip W. Henry (Rialto, CA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Portable Conrad (Portable Library) (Paperback)

CONRAD

Joseph Conrad (born Konrad Korzienowski) spoke no language but his native Polish until his early twenties, when he embarked on mercantile ships to find himself.

In short order, he acquired not only a facility with English, but a genius for distilling the human experience into a few short paragraphs. In "The Nigger of the Narcissus," he examines both the alientation of a minority member , and the insularity of shipboard life in the 19th Century.

It is impossible to read a page of Conrad without being absorbed into the Scenario.
For instance:

"Men stood around very still and with exasperated eyes. It was just what they had expected, and hated to hear, that idea of a stalking death, thrust at them many times a day like a boast and like a menace by this obnoxious nigger. He said to take a pride in that death, which so far, had attended only upon the ease of his life. ....Was he a reality - or was he a sham... this ever-expected visitor...?

The short novel is a demanding genre, of which Conrad is a master. "Typhoon," "Benito Cereno" , "Heart of Darkness" and "The Secret Sharer" are other classics. "Typhoon" contains some of the most vivid descriptions of a storm at sea as have ever been written.
"It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explose all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. .... A fuirious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seks to rout his very spirit out of him."
"Benito Cereno" is a study in suspended animation... the action takes place below the surface.
And "Heart of Darkness" explores the very nature of evil.
In all...this is an excellent collection, with an outstanding introduction by Morton Dawen Zabel. (Five Stars)

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Collection, March 7, 2010

By 

Bill R. Moore (New York, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Portable Conrad (The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The Secret Sharer) (Hardcover)

This great collection has three of Joseph Conrad's excellent short novels -- The...Narcissus (Amazon won't allow the full title), Heart of Darkness, Typhoon) -- and two excellent short stories "Youth" and "The Secret Sharer." This is not only convenient but a great value, making the book a great buy for anyone who can track it down.

Though not in Joseph Conrad's top tier, The...Narcissus (Amazon won't allow the full title) is an excellent novel that would be most writers' best. Conrad turned to writing when nearly forty after more than twenty years at sea, and his early work is dominated by what he experienced on his many voyages. This is no different but significant in coming after his last trip, thus serving as both a goodbye to the sea and a formal introduction to writing. It is not his first novel but is in many ways his most representative - the culmination of his early sea adventure slant and the real beginning of the dense psychological penetration characterizing his masterpieces. Conrad wrote that it was the book by which he would stand or fall as an artist, and so it is; nearly everything great about his later work is here, and there are bits of excellence to which he rarely or never returned. He stands tall indeed.

Like nearly all Conrad, the book works on two levels. The most obvious is a rollicking sea adventure. Those who love the picaresque voyages so common in nineteenth century literature will hardly find a better one; this has all the excitement, suspense, and drama one could want. The voyage has many trials: grueling challenges, hairs-breadth escapes, great tests of strength and stamina, and more. Nearly everything bad that could happen does, pushing weathered sailors to the max in a way that is both entertaining and a tribute to human will and endurance. Even many who find classic literature boring will be engrossed.

This aspect is also of great historical value as a fascinating peek into a bygone era. Life on a ship was practically its own world, often with little connection or similarity to life on land. Conrad vividly shows what a merchant ship voyage was like, painstakingly detailing every aspect from departure to arrival. We see ship life's ups and downs, its bright and dark sides, and also learn much about sailors; everything from daily routines to customs and speech are memorably and believably dramatized.

Here we come to the more important part - the book's dark symbolism. Oscar Wilde said that all art is at once surface and symbol and that those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril; this proves it. Few writers - nay, few people - have been as pessimistic as Conrad, and this lays bare much of his dark vision. While he clearly shows that people are capable of bravery, remarkable feats, and other conventional virtues, he also unflinchingly displays human nature's dark side. As he was always ready to reveal, this lurks always beneath even an ostensibly calm or formidable surface and can jump out without warning - often destructively. Moral ambiguity was his favorite subject, and this explores it profoundly. Specifically, it shows how a single dying black sailor unnerves a white crew - not because of the xenophobia one might expect but ironically because he elicits sympathy. This is in one sense moving, a tribute to human empathy that in many ways shows what is best in people - that, indeed, even the most outwardly selfish and shallow have latent humanity that can come out in extremity. However, the seemingly paradoxical fact that the same stimulus leads to arguments, fights, and near mutiny hints at the other pole of existence that Conrad never lets us forget. One of his great strengths is that, while he dramatizes a wealth of weighty issues, he never stoops to the heavy-handedness so common in writers handling such material and nearly always fatal. He raises the difficult question of empathy vs. unmoved strength and the consequent one of whether the former, however otherwise sublime, has any place in situations like ship life, where truly only the strong survive and even a tinge of weakness may prove disastrous.

This hints at some of the more notable ship life aspects that are still largely unknown - namely that, as in military life, a rare camaraderie is achieved among people who are often very different and would perhaps hardly get along otherwise or even have anything to do with each other. Also noteworthy is just how cosmopolitan ships were, making general concord all the more incredible. However primitive ship life was beside land life in many ways, it was certainly well ahead here.

Inevitably, this brings up the issue of the title, which seems not only politically incorrect but thoroughly perverse. Much has been written on Conrad's race views, and the issue is of great interest and relevance not merely to scholars but to anyone interested in his work. There are of course many who understandably will take the ostensible high road and refuse to read anything with such a title, and probably at least as many apologists are ready to defend Conrad against claims of racism or anything else. However, it is important to avoid knee-jerk reactions and recall a few essential facts. First, it is important to realize that the term as then used in England referred not to Africans or African Americans but West Indians; the character in question is from St. Kitts. Second, though it clearly had racist overtones, it was often used without conscious racism - perhaps even a majority of the time - as a way of designating race or nationality, much as one might say "Irishman" or "Yankee." That said, later sensitivity to the word and all it stands for is a positive development, and we must not excuse Conrad or the book as the product of an era, since there were after all even then some aware of the harm that could come from the word and its significations.

With this in mind, we can proceed to how things work in context. It is certainly true that James Wait, the titular personage, is presented in a way that is often clearly racist; such a characterization would now be near-unpublishable. However, there is far more going on than it first appears. Wait enters the story as an enigma, and the various whites view him with unsurprising distrust and suspicion. Yet it soon becomes clear that he is the subtlest character; though often described as variously primitive, he may well be the most intelligent and well-spoken and is certainly the most resourceful. This is reflected in how the narrator refers to him. The title slur is first used near-ubiquitously, and he is described in overtly racist ways. However, his real name or neutral references are used once his individuality becomes known; the pejorative and racist descriptions are almost gone by the middle of the book, never to return. This suggests that racism and xenophobia generally stem mainly from ignorance and gradually recede with familiarity, the outsiders in question becoming individuals rather than racial cutouts. Regardless of how far Conrad meant this to extend, Wait is anything but a Victorian stereotype and has many traditionally admirable qualities. Even so, like the other characters, we are never quite sure what to make of him. Is he sincere or a fraud? Loathsome and despicable or sympathetic and misunderstood? Conrad has no easy answers, but his nuanced portrait of a true Victorian outsider earns both our sympathy and our fascination and is remarkably subtle for its time despite the title.

Perhaps the foremost thing to remember is that the titular epithet refers specifically to Wait; the book makes no sweeping claims about race or anything else. Indeed, for what it is worth, many ethnic groups and nationalities are disparaged with pejoratives and other condemnations, all others being white. This may be a sign of Conrad's misanthropic streak but is above all simply realistic; he was devoted to realism however harsh the subject and would not have shrunken from showing how sailors really thought, acted, and spoke, however unwholesome to Mrs. Grundy. We can easily and legitimately debate his motives in using the title as well as insisting on it despite controversy. Perhaps he wanted attention or was being provocative, but it was again most likely a realist instinct. Even knowing all this, some may find it hard to buy or read a book with such a title, especially to keep it on their bookshelf - perhaps even only because of what the uninitiated may say. Those who like the book or want to read it but just cannot make the plunge can, if they choose, take the easy way out by getting one of many collections containing the work without including it in the title.

Wait is in any event not the only interesting character. This has one of Conrad's largest and most diverse casts, and all are drawn with memorable vigor. As anyone at all familiar with him would expect, he puts none on a pedestal. Most are indeed at least partly vile, again showing human nature's dark side, but there is something courageous or otherwise admirable - even noble - about most of them as well, giving further nuance. The penetrating psychological characterization of a single character so characteristic of Conrad is not here, but he distributes his artistry more evenly, which is about equally compelling.

Conrad certainly wrote many more seagoing tales, and themes dealt with for the rest of his career are largely anticipated here, but this also differs from other work in important ways. For instance, he is infamous for lacking humor, but this has many light-hearted elements, especially in regard to characters - some of whom are comical in a near-Dickensian manner - and their actions; Chapter One in particular is almost a burlesque. This gives some relief from the alternating high adventure and high seriousness that some miss in more representative... Read more ›