| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Crank the Windlass and set sail,
By Brendan Kennedy (Boulder, CO USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Shadow-Line: A Confession (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Paperback)
I enjoyed reading about the main characters experience of crossing the line from youthfulness into true adulthood. Conrad's eloquent, descriptive, and almost surreal writing style allows the reader to almost experience the stagnation, heat, and frustration that envelop the characters in this book. Perhaps not Conrad's best book, but certainly a good read, and it is quite short and to the point. Especially if you have an affinity for sailing and the power and majesty of the sailing vessels of old. I have always felt that there is a certain amount of effort required to enjoy Conrad's books, but I also feel that this, in a sense, is directly proportional to effort in life. The more you put in, the more you get out.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Sink or Swim,
By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Shadow-Line: A Confession (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin) (Paperback)
THE SHADOW-LINE is not one of Conrad's more obscure works, but neither is it among his most famous. It is short, beautiful and very accessible, and deserves to be read. It is about growing up, growing into ones self and conscience, with the understanding that sometimes external events come along to force the maturation process nearly overnight, and if you are lucky, you swim. As he states in the author's note that has accompanied the text since the second edition, his mind was on his son Borys and his comrades who were off fighting in World War I at the time. The landscape of his story, though, comes out of his own youthful experience at sea.
The unnamed first person narrator of THE SHADOW-LINE has already distinguished himself at sea but is still a young man given to youthful emotion and brashness. He has decided that despite friendships, his love of the sea and his skills, that there is an absence of meaning to his career and he is emphatically throwing it off at a South Seas port with the intention of going home. But then he is made the one offer he cannot resist: his own command of a full-masted commercial barque that has come to port after the captain had gone mad with disease and was buried at sea. The narrator quickly pushes to get back out on the open seas despite the fact that the first mate seems to be growing increasingly sick. Suddenly stuck out where he had originally wanted to be, the narrator is faced with the spread of illness across the crew and the discovery that his deceased predecessor had destroyed the ship's pharmacy in his derangement. The responsibility of the situation would be terrible in any circumstances, much less a first command. The Penguin edition contains a lengthy critical introduction (ridden with spoilers, by the way), an annotated critical bibliography, and text notes. The latter define technical and arcane terms but also note where the story dovetails with facts of Conrad's own life. All of these are useful, but the novel itself is what is valuable here, with its memorable characters and honest descriptive passages of both exterior and interior worlds.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Lesser Known Classic,
By moose/squirrel (USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Shadow-Line: A Confession (Oxford World's Classics) (Paperback)
One of Conrad's best novels, less profound than Heart of Darkness, certainly, but more economically written and featuring a narrator that more readers will identify with.
The Shadow Line is a nice sequel of sorts to Conrad's great story "Youth." In that, he showed how we often interpret events differently as youngsters and years later as adults. In The Shadow Line, the young protagonist has to improvise under stress to deal with the big world he's grown into. Like all Conrad's works, this is wordy and slow by current standards, but well worth the time and effort to read it. Great practice for high-school seniors and college freshmen who want to step up to real literature.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
