Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I've been wanting to read this book for ages already. I read "The Secret Sharer" in college and was very impressed with Conrad's style. Had this book been written in the 21st century, it probably would have been edited down to about 2/3 (at least) and I'm pretty sure they would have cut out most of the narrator's quotations marks (he is telling the entire story to some men if I remember correctly). It gets really confusing when the narrator quotes other people. So this is not an easy book to read by any means. There is a lot of meandering and side stories that leave you wondering what the point is.

The narrator, who is a ship captain, seems rather obsessed with Jim, but quite honestly, even though the book is very long, I never could get a satisfactory grasp on either Jim or the narrator. In a review, someone compared it to The Great Gatsby; but in that book, both Gatsby as well as the narrator will be forever unforgettable characters for me. I'm thinking that it was this (the almost unintentional revelation of the narrator's character) that makes Fitzgerald's book so fascinating.

But Conrad is indeed a poet. He writes of the ship, the Patna (and there are many passages like this in the book): "She held on straight for the Red Sea under a serene sky, under a sky scorching and unclouded, enveloped in a fulgor of sunshine that killed all thought, oppressed the heart, withered all impulses of strength and energy. And under the sinister splendour of that sky the sea, blue and profound, remained still, without a stir, without a ripple, without a wrinkle--viscous, stagnant, dead."

In a way, it is a pity that "Lord Jim" cannot be revised in a way that would make it more succinct and clearer in story and character development.



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