I read this book for two reasons:

1) It was on my roommate's shelf and I needed something to read.

2) It was made into a movie starring Peter O'Toole, one of the greatest actors to ever live.

Hey, what better reason to read a book, right? (Heh heh)
I started actually reading it and got about three chapters in before I realized that it was going to put an end to my reading streak. So I got the audio book.
And it put an end to my reading streak.
Listening to the audio book actually took me LONGER than really reading the damn thing.
Very good book, though. It's a tough one to get through. Classics are always hard for me, so keep that in mind. I started reading The Count Of Monte Cristo about ten years ago. Haven't picked it up since.
I finished this one, though. And I'm glad I did. Check it out if you're up to it.

2.5

I learned from this book that some books are hard to read. I learned that it is possible to need the cliff's notes to a book so that you can understand what the hell you are reading. I also know that unless you're Mary Shelley, a circular narration is probably a bad idea.

It's hard for me to rate this one. I did enjoy the language immensely, even though it was overwrought in places, and Conrad often uses 10 words when 1 would suffice. However, it was nice to luxuriate in the prose. It's because of that prose that a highly personal, fairly low stakes story can become epic. The epic is one man's soul and his fight to come to terms with himself and his idea of himself. It's heartbreaking. You can see why Conrad had such an influence on modern writers. It's even more impressive that English was his 3rd language.

If it was just the story and language, this would be 4.5 stars. However, it is deeply racist. I want to say unthinkingly, but Conrad was very intelligent, and I'm sure he knew what he was doing. It's unfortunate that such a great writer is marred in this way.

Honour, once lost...

As a youth, Jim dreamed of glory, sure that one day he would meet a challenge that would give him the opportunity to prove his honour to the world. But when the moment comes, an act of cowardice places him beyond the pale, despised by his peers and by himself. Driven from place to place with his story always catching up with him, Jim is eventually offered a position in Patusan, a small country on a remote Indonesian island, where he will be able to start afresh among natives who neither know nor care about his past. But despite the admiration and even love he wins there, Jim still carries his disgrace and guilt inside himself...

After introducing Jim and telling us a little of his background as the son of a clergyman trained to be an officer in the merchant fleet, the long first section tells of his fateful voyage aboard the Patna, a rather decrepit vessel carrying hundreds of pilgrims across the Arabian Sea en route to Mecca. Marlow, our narrator, first encounters Jim during the official inquiry into this voyage, so that we know from the beginning that something went badly wrong. Jim alone of the ship’s officers has remained to face the inquiry and Marlow becomes fascinated by this young man, whose actions seem so alien to his appearance.

“...all the time I had before me these blue, boyish eyes looking straight into mine, this young face, these capable shoulders, the open bronzed forehead with a white line under the roots of clustering fair hair, this appearance appealing at sight to all my sympathies: this frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful seriousness. He was of the right sort; he was one of us.”

As in Heart of Darkness, Conrad is examining the effects of colonialism, not on the colonised, but on the colonisers. Through Jim, he shows that the Empire has created a change in how the British imagine the rank of “gentleman”: no longer a title simply describing the land-owning class, but now a word that has come to represent a set of virtues – courage, moral rectitude, fairness, chivalry, patriotism and honour. Despite the book’s title, Jim is no member of the aristocracy – he is one of the new middle-class breed of gentlemen, educated to these virtues and sent out to carry British values through all the vast reach of the Empire. So his disgrace is more than a personal thing – it’s a weakening of the image the British project as a validation of their right to rule. Where an aristocrat with family power and wealth behind him might fall and be forgiven, these new gentlemen have only these virtues to justify their rank, and to fail in them is to lose that status – to be no longer “one of us”.

The story of the Patna is wonderfully told. Marlow takes his time in revealing the fate of the ship, digressing frequently so that gradually he builds a fascinating picture of the transient world of the merchant seamen who serviced the trade routes of the various colonial powers. As he finally reaches the incident that changes Jim’s life so irreversibly and its aftermath, Conrad employs some wonderful horror imagery, again related more to the imagined than the real. Imagination seems central to his theme – Jim’s imagination of how he would react in a moment of crisis as compared to the actuality, the imagined virtues of the gentleman, the imagined role of the colonisers as just and paternalistic, if stern, guardians of their colonised “natives”. Even the fate of the Patna is more imagined than real, showing that honour and its loss is dependant on intent rather than effect.

The second section of the book doesn’t work quite so well. When Marlow visits Jim in Patusan some years later, Jim tells him of his life there, how he has found a kind of peace in this isolated place, among natives who have given him the honorific title of “Lord” as a reward for his bringing peace and prosperity where before there had been only strife. Even allowing for the imagined fable-like quality of the story, Jim’s rise to prominence in this society smacks a little too much of white superiority to make for comfortable reading, and his love affair with the woman he calls Jewel (white, of course, but not English, therefore not his equal) is full of high melodrama and exalted suffering. However, the knowledge that he can never resume his place in the world of the white man festers, while his terror remains that his new-found respect could be lost should his story become known or, worse, should he face another trial of character and fail again. After a rather too long drag through this part of the story, the pace and quality picks up again, with the final section having all the depth and power of the earlier Patna segment.

The quality of the writing and imagery is excellent, although I found the structure Conrad uses for telling the story makes it a more difficult read than it needs to be and requires some suspension of disbelief. Jim’s story is relayed to us as a first-person account within a third-person frame, as our narrator, Marlow, tells Jim’s story to a group of colonial friends after dinner one evening. This device means the bulk of the book is given to us within quotation marks, which can become quite confusing when Marlow is relating conversations, especially at second-hand between third parties. Repeated use of nested punctuation marks like “‘“...”’” can make the modern reader (this one at any rate) shudder, and I found I frequently had to re-read paragraphs more than once to be sure of who had said what to whom. The idea of Marlow telling around 75% of the story in one long after-dinner tale is also clumsy – the audiobook comes in at 16 hours, so I can only assume Marlow’s friends were willing to sit listening not just until dawn but roughly to lunchtime the following day.

These quibbles aside, the book is a wonderful study of the British gentleman who, as a class, ruled the Empire – a character who appears in simpler forms in everything from Rider Haggard’s African adventure stories to Agatha Christie’s retired colonials. Conrad shows how this type was imagined into being, and how important it was to the British sense of its own identity abroad and its justification of its right to rule. If we are more virtuous than everyone else, is it not natural that we should be their lords? And having imagined ourselves in this way, what is left of us, as individuals and as cogs in the Imperial machine, if we falter, weaken and fail?

An excellent book, both in simple terms of the extraordinary story of Jim’s life and for the depth and insight into the Victorian Imperial mindset. Highly recommended. 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Oxford World’s Classics. As usual, the knowledgeable introduction and notes, this time by Jacques Berthoud, aided considerably in placing the book in its literary and historical context and in giving me food for thought, thus helping to inform my review.

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Every once in a while I pick up a classic and this time it was Lord Jim. I am always amazed at how well Joseph Conrad writes in English considering it's not his native language.

This is no light beach read, but it is a thought provoking view into man's nature. It did take me a little while to get into the novel and I found it a bit trying at times to understand who was "speaking", but overall I found it an interesting read and was drawn to Jim and his situation.

Tai galėtų būti aukščiausių įvertinimų verta istorija, bet nėra, nes autorius piktnaudžiauja savo pranašumu, viską pernelyg plačiai aiškina ir kartais kone priverčia nuobodžiauti. (Galbūt jam būtų pravertęs rūstus redaktorius, pasiryžęs viską iš eilės braukyti ir irzliai ginčytis.) Kita vertus, tai yra įdomus pavyzdys, kaip nuotykių romaną primenančiame pasakojime, įsuktame į turtingo literatūrinio stiliaus audeklą, užgimsta tarsi aukštesnio lygio idėjos. Conradas eksperimentuoja, rašydamas apie tai, ką pasakotojui sakė kiti asmenys, kažką svarbaus girdėję iš trečiųjų asmenų. Ir dėl to mes galime būti tikri, kad tokioje grandinėje, kaip sugedusiame telefone, tiesa neišvengiamai pradeda klaidžioti. Mes vienu metu pasiklystame ne vieno, bet kelių slirtingų personažų galvose. Man rodos, kad taip XIX amžiaus pabaigos romane, gal kiek manieringame romane, randasi postnodernūs atgarsiai, kuriuos, tiesa, plėtojo jau ne tiek Conradas, kiek vėlesni autoriai.

Tai nėra lengvas, greitas skaitinys, ir jis tikrai neprilygsta Conrado šedevrui "Tamsos širdis" jau vien dėl ištęstumo, kurį, tikiu, lengviau buvo pakęsti XX, o ne XXI amžiaus, skaitytojui. Bet galiu rekomenduoti jį drąsiems literatūros gerbėjams - o gal neteks nusivilti?

The story and plot overall is strong, as would be expected from such a renowned author, but the writing itself lost me, sometimes confused me, and eventually led me to google the characters and plot so I could understand what was going on. I enjoyed the story overall, but the read was a complete slog. And, of course, now I would like to re-read the first few chapters to see if I can tell what’s happening better now that I know the ending than I could glean when reading those early chapters the first time through. There’s a lot going on in the story, though, and if I were still an English teacher, I would have a heyday teaching this novel. Guilt and shame, innocence and responsibility, colonialism and racism, retreat and renown, and honor - whether misguided or not - are all prominent themes among many more that could be expanded upon from this book.

One of the best books I've ever read. And I've read a lot.

La mejor novela que he leído de Joseph Conrad. Una historia de valor, honor, y aventura en los mares del Sur, cargada de psicología y más fondo que un vino viejo. Una historia con sabor a historia, de esas que se cuentan a la luz de una hoguera, y te vas a la cama sin dejar de pensar. Te deja el regusto a sargazos, a sal y a selva durante días. Para mí, uno de los mejores escritores de la era contemporánea.