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    Lord Jim
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    Lord Jim
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    Lord Jim
    Ebook426 pages7 hours

    Lord Jim

    By Joseph Conrad

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Celebrated by many critics as one of the greatest English-language novels of the twentieth century, Lord Jim tells the story of a British seaman tried for dereliction of duty. Coming into the graces of a sympathetic sea captain, Jim escapes his checkered past on a remote island with several despondent native populations. Winning the love and respect of the disenfranchised locals, Jim discovers that second chances often come with opportunities for sacrifice and redemption.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStart Publishing LLC
    Release dateMar 25, 2013
    ISBN9781625588913
    Author

    Joseph Conrad

    Polish author Joseph Conrad is considered to be one of the greatest English-language novelists, a remarkable achievement considering English was not his first language. Conrad’s literary works often featured a nautical setting, reflecting the influences of his early career in the Merchant Navy, and his depictions of the struggles of the human spirit in a cold, indifferent world are best exemplified in such seminal works as Heart of Darkness, Lord JimM, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, and Typhoon. Regarded as a forerunner of modernist literature, Conrad’s writing style and characters have influenced such distinguished writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Hunter S. Thompson, and George Orwell, among many others. Many of Conrad’s novels have been adapted for film, most notably Heart of Darkness, which served as the inspiration and foundation for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 film Apocalypse Now.

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    Reviews for Lord Jim

    3.5/5

    935 ratings46 reviews

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    • 4/5
      As in Heart of Darkness and some of his short fiction, Conrad has a man named Marlow narrate the story to a group of contemporaries. Here we learn of Jim, an earnest and able young seaman who, at least in his own eyes, betrays the moral code he was born under, and spends the rest of his life trying to put that failure behind him and atone for it.As first mate on a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims to Mecca, Jim is on night watch when the vessel strikes something, possibly the floating remains of a wreck, and begins taking on water. In the ensuing confusion, Jim's conscience is wracked--there are clearly not enough lifeboats to save all the passengers and crew. Most of the pilgrims are asleep and unaware of the danger. Should they be alerted, or allowed to go peacefully down with the ship? What is Jim to do? The captain and other officers having already made the decision to abandon the ship, they urge Jim to join them in their lifeboat. Although he does not make a conscious decision to do so, he finds himself in the lifeboat with them, having mindlessly jumped or been pitched over the side by the violent motion of the ship. Regardless of the "facts" so vehemently demanded by the official inquiry later on, this is an outcome for which Jim can never forgive himself. Ultimately he removes himself from civilization, with the help of Marlow and his contacts, finding a sort of refuge among native people in a remote village, presumably somewhere in Indonesia, where he brings an end to a local conflict and finally seems to have escaped the shadow of his past. To the grateful inhabitants, he has become Tuan (Lord) Jim. But (no surprise) this is only a relatively happy interlude in the man's full life story.The novel is full of the descriptive passages Conrad did so well, of symbolism and philosophical musing, and of diversions from the main tale. The latter are never irrelevant, but some are more engaging than others. The reader is always getting Jim's story from at least one remove, as Marlow does not have personal knowledge of all of it himself. Nevertheless, he takes a life-long interest in Jim, feeling it is his duty to tell and interpret what he does know, to dispel rumors and assumptions among his fellow sailors, and to somehow "understand" Jim, who despite being "one of us", had repeatedly behaved otherwise. Taken down to its bones, this is a pretty simple, almost Shakespearean, tale of guilt, penance and retribution, with enough ambiguity and social commentary thrown in to make it very interesting.Reviewed February 2017
    • 3/5
      Meh. Descriptions of scenery were overwrought. Marlow often relates incidents told to him by someone else, and occasionally the person who told him was told by a third person, yet Marlow claims to know the internal motivations of the participants. The romantic pairing was implausible, as the woman Jim falls in love with is, conveniently, the only hot chick in the jungle amongst the rest of the dirty filthy savages. Dated. Definitely does not hold up over time.
    • 5/5
      Lord Jim is one of the finest novels written in the English language. It's story of lost honor is timeless; and Conrad's narrative structure is as innovative and daring as that foundin Joyce's Ulysses.
    • 2/5
      Good lord, this book is boring. At it's core is a wonderful tale of youth, cowardice, courage and redemption, but this is brutally buried by the narrator's need to philosophize and expound on his own feelings at each twist and turn of the story, for all that he isn't even present for most of it. Conrad may have succeeded here in single-handedly popularizing the "enough about me, what do you think of me?" trope. I loved [Heart of Darkness] and began this with anticipation, but after dragging myself halfway through I gave up in disgust. I have only so many hours to live and read, after all.
    • 5/5
      Read as I revisit Conrad from front to back. This is the culmination of his early novels - many familiar threads from the works up to this one, right up to the long Marlowe monologue. Conrad's ambivalence to race, especially compared to the time he was writing, stands out to the modern reader.
    • 3/5
      This books was hard to get through, Joseph Conrad has a very extensive vocabulary and I found myself using the dictionary quite often. The action was very parse in it's delivery and I found Conrad rambling on about useless information which cause me to have to read some chapters multiple times. I haven't really decided on if I liked his narrator telling the story to another character, it was like a character in the book reading a book to you. I thought it was really easy to lose contact with who was speaking. I have a hard time considering that this is considered one of the 100 greatest books of all times. My assumption is that their must not be very many good books in general. However, after stating all of this, I did find the boy some what entertaining. It was separated into three distinct areas: the trial, a wandering period and the island. I did not really fully get the antagonist, Lord Jim himself, as representing the main insight of this novel or as a physiological self-examining exploration as some reviews have suggested the book explores. Not that I don't see some of that in the novel, but I saw the book as expression of the world surround Tuan Jim and how self involved and critical the world is.
    • 5/5
      When I finished this book, I stayed up not wanting to end the experience. I felt to a degree rarely experienced that I had been with Jim and with Marlowe. Until now I had been avoiding Conrad. I found him or thought I found him overwritten turgid, too sturm and drang but I can see now I was wrong. First there is the psychological insight. This was an amazing existential portrait and as someone has said the greatest depiction of shame in the English language. A friend of mine has maintained that the Polish not the Russian writers are the gold standard for psychological portraiture and I now concede. Here also there is the technique, this use of Marlowe to provide the portrait, this invested third party with a greater scope of understanding that Lord Jim which allows for the penetration to the levels below the surface. I must find out how often he used this because the technique is superb. I am also astonished how quickly Conrad wrote this, less than a year. It's a masterpiece to me and is now one of my favorite books. I will always be reading Conrad now that I have "discovered" him.
    • 3/5
      Individual characters are exquisitely, yet interminably, rendered. Descriptions of nature are vast and compelling "in the appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations."Lord Jim is a slow moving psychological drama with confusion: who hit the dead guy on the ship? who locked the people in? who let them out? why was Jim a coward when he was the one wholoosened the rafts overboard so people could jump in? was Captain Robinson really the same lone surviving Robinson Crusoe and could he really have eaten his fellow survivors?!?And why does Jim offer himself as a suicide sacrifice? Does that really help and protect his people? And isn't he again a coward for breaking his promise to his lover?
    • 3/5
      Most reviewers have written of the psychological story (guilt/redemption) and plot, but I picked it up again after first reading it several decades ago, because of the setting behind the story--details of life in 19th century Southeast Asia and the Malay Archipelago. Conrad was inspired by a true story of a pilgrim ship carrying Muslim pilgrims whose crew did desert it when it appeared to be sinking on August 8, 1880. The novel's trial and much of the story takes place in Singapore and Southeast Asia -- hence an interesting read for anyone who has previously read this book but was unmindful of the incredibly evocative and realistic details of the story's scenes and people--monsoon rains, endless chirping insects, the sharpness of a Malay kris, the gentle brush of palm leaves in a breeze...and how the threat of an imminent death was so often a possibility.
    • 1/5
      I read 10/45 chapters and in two words: boring, monotonous! Tis the story of the sea and a ship sinking or not and the inquest and it was just awful! Conrad is excessively verbose, I could not ascertain a plot, and slogging through this has already killed too many brain cells. 1 star. I know it's a classic, but really!
    • 3/5
      Way back when I was in high school, my English class had to read Lord Jim. None of us students liked it. The English teacher suggested that this was a book we should reread in middle age; we would understand better what it means to be "one of us" then. So now, in memory of this teacher, I took up the challenge and reread Lord Jim as a mature adult. I didn't like it any better the second time around. The novel's plot is simple: the maritime career of a young British man named Jim is ruined after he and his fellow crew members desert a sinking ship. Jim's shame at his own cowardice drives him ever eastward, and he finally settles on a remote Indonesian island. There the natives revere him as the white man with all the answers. Then the outside world, in the form of a motley band of robbers, intrudes. The narrative, which is told from multiple perspectives, features page-long paragraphs and sentences with multiple semi-colons, not to mention lots of French and German phrases and nineteenth-century nautical terms. At least the individual chapters are short.The declaration that Jim is "one of us" occurs in several places. The phrase means different things in different contexts, but the overarching idea is that Jim is a "romantic". However, unless I missed something, the term "romantic" remains undefined.Lord Jim is a literary classic. I am glad that I gave it another try, but I still failed to find much to appreciate in it.
    • 3/5
      Lord Jim is a tale of honor lost and regained — a sort of adventure on the high seas with unsavory pirates and official Inquiries and almond-eyed damsels in distress. The narrator turns over the meaning of honor as he describes Jim's life, alternately sympathizing and feeling aversion, and never coming to a judgment, about Jim in particular and about honor in general. Jewel's misery and appeals to fight are challenges to this particular brand of honor (although since she's female and non-white, and this is 1900, her challenge is pretty feeble).Jim has a stubborn insistence in his own redemption by sticking it out. He seems to regard answering for his actions as both the most excruciating punishment and the only way to live with himself. While the external drama regarding society's official judgment of him plays out, he is concerned only with the personal — explaining himself to one sympathetic listener, appearing every day at the Inquiry, answering to Doramin.
    • 1/5
      I read 10/45 chapters and in two words: boring, monotonous! Tis the story of the sea and a ship sinking or not and the inquest and it was just awful! Conrad is excessively verbose, I could not ascertain a plot, and slogging through this has already killed too many brain cells. 1 star. I know it's a classic, but really!
    • 5/5
      Long on my list to read, I took the last three weeks to seclude myself for longer spates of time. I was captured by the exquisite descriptions nestled in unending sentences. I would be absorbed in the tale when a phrase would stop me and I would have to reread it two or three times to digest its depth.
      "You take a different view of your actions when you come to understand, when you are made to understand every day that your existence is necessary - you see, absolutely necessary - to another person."

      It is now on my "Read" shelf, but will return in a few years to the one entitled, "Read again"
    • 3/5
      Intrigerend en meeslepend. Qua constructie duidelijke tweedeling: incident met de Patria en leven in PatusanCentraal: gewetensconflict van Jim en hoe hij dat probeerde recht te zetten door elders ?goed? te doen en grootheid te bereikenOp achtergrond ook imperialisme-kolonialisme debat: niet zo heel duidelijk wel standpunt Conrad inneemt (zeker niet politiek); wel cultureel: nefaste invloed van westerse inmenging op locale cultuur, maar die wordt zeker niet als model gesteld
    • 2/5
      Difficult to follow. I'm currently reading an early edition, which may have a lot to do with the difficulty.
    • 4/5
      LORD JIM is a novel focused on the imperial zeitgeist of the age. The age is the years between 1876 to the beginning of world war one. Europe was beaming in its nationalism, imperialism, and as well as aliances between nation states. Europe could be seen as a cage where the main event in the WWE would be held, in this corner Germany and the Hapsburgs vs. London and France. We see explorers controlling new lands and new people. We find adventures awaiting.
      So what if you don't care about the imperial age? Are you a Star Trek or Battle Star Galactica fan? One then can imagine the ocean as deep space, and the natives as aliens. I found it easier to concentrate on the plot when I imagined Jim as captain Kirk. I could understand the imperialistic superiority over native cultures, if I thought of the natives as aliens or droids.
      Conrad poses profound questions: Can a man run away from his past ruins? Or do they hunt him down till the present moment catches up with him? Is the earth big enough to hold the caper?"
      I loved the narration by Stewart Lewis on Libri Vox. He does a great job with a tricky book. I could understand Conrad's humor by Stewart Lewis's reading of the novel.
      The book overall was imperially commanding.

    • 4/5
      Nice edition with copious notes and a decent introduction. The book moves along nicely in the beginning and the end, but becomes quite dense and slow in the middle. Tuan Jim finds his path to glory after a stumble in his youth, and snatches redemption in the end by facing up at last to his fatal flaw. Marlow narrates and provides the contrasting viewpoint of an older, more jaded, observer, who can still recall his own young, romantic ideals.
    • 4/5
      Conrad pits a flawed man against the primitive where he reigns in honor, while those of his kind hold him out as a coward. He tries to redeem himself and loses his life a better man. Always a good read and a gifted writer.
    • 3/5
      Interesting book on colonialism and travelling. But it dwells in so many details and the structure is so dense that it becomes a real chore to try and read it.
    • 5/5
      He is indeed romantic. He is more idealist than Julian (The Red and the Black).
      Conrad's narrative is impressive.
      After finishing: very very sad, I almost cried. Why don't the authors leave their characters alone!!! Foken Brown!
    • 3/5
      This book is quite slow going, and the dense writing style makes it fairly heavy going. I had the feeling that the story would be more suited to a novella than a full novel. I also felt the format of the story being told through Marlowe a bit awkward.The latter part of the book reminded me a bit of Kiplings "the man who would be king", and I wonder if Conrad was influenced by Kipling? Or perhaps the idea of a white man becoming lord/king of a small foreign country appealed to British people at that time.Looking back on the story as a whole, it's an interesting tale, but would benefit from going on a diet and being told in a different format.
    • 5/5
      Classic, now almost immortal, literary enhancement of the 19th Century colonial, adventure & coming-of-age novels. Having dishonoured himself by cowardice at sea, the protagonist Jim finally lands in the small, withdrawn realm of Patusan, where his wilful heroism lifts a local tribe from misery & oppression, only to choke its future all the more completely when his past & demons catch up with him. Shows the West's colonial paternalism in both its most radiant, exalted light & in its most ineradicable flaws - all by exposing the composite nature of humanity itself, of a single man, himself flawed, in fullest strength & despairing frailty.
    • 3/5
      This is a great book to read in terms of the lyrical style of the writing. I got lost in the ebb and flow of the writing, and got a little lost in the plot. This is not a simple tale, and I would need to come back to it again. I shall read it a bit more slowly than I did, and shall take it bit by bit. I hope that they do not teach it in schools, because it is far too complex for most school kids.While I got lost in the plot, I must say that I loved the writing.
    • 2/5
      I struggled a lot to get through this book and I liked it less the more I read. It is a very interesting book, however, in terms of its themes and philosophy. Jim is an incredibly human character, who must live with the shame and guilt of his mistakes in a very stratified world of British seamanship and imperialism. My primary compliant is that this is a very psychological novel but the author never really gets into the main character's head.
    • 4/5
      Classic tale of one man's redemption the "hard" way
    • 4/5
      Lord Jim has haunted me most of my adult life. Jim's would be heroic saga was the one assigned book that I did not read entirely. The one book for which I resorted to using Cliff notes. The horror! I royally botched the test; well at least by my standards I did. I can't explain my failure to make it through the novel. Conrad is one of my favorite writers. Whatever the reason, I have felt badly about it ever since.

      On this second reading, I found more reason to push through it, though I admit that at times I needed the impetus of a recording, a remarkably bad livrovox recording. I found the story slow going though enjoyable in a vaguely painful way. I suppose there is an immature part of my psyche that wants to understand Jim as heroic, as Conrad's answer to Billy Budd, but he simply isn't. He is the product of such adventure stories; he is a would be Billy or Quee-quegg but ultimately he lacks the moral resolve. There is no reason for me to expect this. Marlowe makes it clear from the beginning that Jim is not heroic. Yet, Marlowe sees the possibility of his being such. In the end, Marlowe is as perplexed as I am as what to make of Jim or his story. In the end Jim is much like most of us.

      Also, there were times I wish Marlowe would just shut up. He seems to drone on and on.
    • 3/5
      Intrigerend en meeslepend. Qua constructie duidelijke tweedeling: incident met de Patria en leven in PatusanCentraal: gewetensconflict van Jim en hoe hij dat probeerde recht te zetten door elders “goed” te doen en grootheid te bereikenOp achtergrond ook imperialisme-kolonialisme debat: niet zo heel duidelijk wel standpunt Conrad inneemt (zeker niet politiek); wel cultureel: nefaste invloed van westerse inmenging op locale cultuur, maar die wordt zeker niet als model gesteld
    • 5/5
      Lord Jim. Turn to any page in this book and you will find breathtaking descriptions of a man's demeanour or facial expressions when struggling to come to a decision. The passages on seascapes and cloud castles in the sky, hanging dark and ominous, are brilliant.The problem is, that is all there is. The wordplay is such that the story, if it can be so termed, is lost under it's weight. Metaphorically, we have a passer-by here who is asked, “Did you see anything?” The next five pages in this long book describe his face as he forms his reply. The following three pages, his clothes and the condition of his hard used shoes. After some talk of his mother who sewed seam after seam to keep from starving for a few pages, the man forms his reply: “No.” That is his only part in the book, we have just spent an evening reading about him .. .. .. and so it goes on .. .. ..To keep this review shorter than the book, I find it best to take this tome down from time to time and read a page or two to marvel at Conrad’s ability to conjure magic with words. I would love to read the whole thing from cover to cover but have only ever got half-way before losing interest. There are too many wonderful books waiting on my shelves, some by Joseph Conrad, to waste time floundering in this one.However, even if you only read the first few pages or the last, you will have to agree it is well worth five whole stars.
    • 4/5
      A young man, raised in a good family with good values, views himself as a fundamentally good person. He settles on a career at sea where his confidence, courage, and commitment help him quickly rise through the ranks to a position of considerable prestige and responsibility. On an ill-fated voyage, though, disaster strikes and, in a moment of panic, the young man’s courage deserts him in a way that imperils the lives of hundreds of passengers under his charge. Does this one action make the man a coward, either in his own mind or in the eyes of others? If so, to what lengths must he go to seek redemption for that single, critical transgression? What is the ultimate price that he must pay to restore his sense of honor?These are the questions that frame the basic story in Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad’s psychological profile of one man’s fall from grace and subsequent struggle to redeem himself. In fact, for me, the novel actually works better on the level of a character study than it does as a compelling adventure tale. To be sure, the author’s writing is beautifully rendered throughout the book and some of the descriptions of the protagonist’s exploits at sea and in the remote Malay village where he ends up are amazing. However, there are also lengthy passages in which the narrator—the same Capitan Marlow from Heart of Darkness—drones on in a way that detracts considerably from the flow of the story. So, despite its reputation as one of the great novels of the past century, what will stay with me about Lord Jim is its timeless message about human fallibility and the power of second chances.