The Secret Sharer and other stories

by Joseph Conrad

This is a collection of gripping tales of crime, crisis or disaster, in which ordinary people find themselves tested in extraordinary circumstances.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Classics, Literature, British Literature, Adventure, 20th Century

256 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1999

About the author

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and, although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he became a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable, and amoral world.
Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I rejoiced in the great security of the sea as compared with the unrest of the land, in my choice of that untempted life presenting no disquieting problems, invested with an elementary moral beauty by the absolute straightforwardness of its appeal and the singleness of its purpose."

A fine trio of stories by the poetic sea-dog Conrad.
"Youth" is the other story to feature Marlow, of "Heart of Darkness" fame, tells of his early years aboard a doomed but persistent ship.
"Typhoon", one of Conrad's finest pieces, is about a stoic, almost simplistic captain weathering a deadly storm. For sheer drama and shit-in-your-pants prose, I've rarely read its equal. I got so nervous reading this I nearly crapped my fo'c'sle. Seriously, though, this one is worth reading even if you skip the others.
"The Secret Sharer" tells of a young captain who finds another young sailor, who murdered a crew member of another ship, clinging to the ladder of is ship. He hides the fugitive and shares his story. A story of a "double", in a way, more mysterious and weird than Conrad's other work, but amazing nonetheless.

[Nikola · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Poetika strave" polako postaje "Poetika slaba dvojka".

[dead letter office · Rating 3 out of 5]

i think conrad is weirder and more complicated than i give him credit for. i need to read more of his stuff, because i think it might be an acquired taste.

[John Pistelli · Rating 5 out of 5]

[This volume contains four novellas. You can read my discussion of all of them at my website. Below, I post only my thoughts on one:]

Finally (albeit second in the volume), we come to The Shadow-Line (1917), a short novel often hailed as a late masterpiece amid a general decline in the author's oeuvre. Conrad's Turn of the Screw —he even ventures the same metaphor that titles his friend's most famous ghost story when his narrator writes of "a renewed moment of intolerable suspense; something like an additional turn of the racking screw"—The Shadow-Line was interpreted by early readers as a ghost story.

The narrator looks back on his first command of a sailing ship in the late 19th century. He has capriciously given up his job as first mate on a ship, when another command finds him in an Eastern port where he's waiting to return to England. The novella's opening is famously slow, unsettling in its very slowness, as the narrator eventually receives his new opportunity by a circuitous route several times menaced by the unscrupulous manager of a sailors' home and his most dissolute guest. Another of his neighbors in the hostel, though, Captain Giles, knows what our narrator needs and eventually extends him the information he requires to claim his command.

On board his new ship, the captain learns that his predecessor died in apparent insanity; when the ship finds itself stranded in windless seas, the first mate believes the captain is haunting the ship, vengefully halting them in the place of his sea burial. (This impassible site is one meaning of the work's title; another is the line dividing youth from maturity, innocence from experience.) Moreover, fever strikes the ship's crew, felling all but the captain and a cook named Ransome, who labors with tranquil diligence despite a heart defect that might kill him at any time.

Much of the novella is devoted to the creation of atmosphere, Conrad's superb evocation of the madness that stubbornly calm winds and still seas can inflict on a sailor, the existential insight into humanity's essential isolation in a meaningless and mysterious cosmos such a predicament provokes:

For a long, long time I faced an empty world, steeped in an infinity of silence, through which the sunshine poured and flowed for some mysterious purpose. [...] [A]s I emerge on deck the ordered arrangement of the stars meets my eye, unclouded, infinitely wearisome. There they are: stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed.

As in later existentialist writers like Camus, however, Conrad dismisses the supernatural as aid or explanation and again insists on individual and collective human effort—on "facing it"—to survive and push back the darkness. Captain Giles pronounces the moral when the narrator encounters him again at the end of the novella:

“You will learn soon how not to be faint-hearted. A man has got to learn everything—and that’s what so many of them youngsters don’t understand.”

The text is weird and uncanny—the narrator uses both words to describe his trouble—but Conrad was irked at those who read this almost straightforwardly autobiographical novella as a ghost story. In response he wrote an "Author's Note" that expresses contempt for the supernatural, that insists he intended only a psychological study of the subjective effects of a weeks-long stay in windless seas on a captain and sailors, and that conveys such fine aristocratic disgust for superstition that Christopher Hitchens included it in his anthology The Portable Atheist:

But I could never have attempted such a thing, because all my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. The world of the living contains enough marvels and mysteries as it is; marvels and mysteries acting upon our emotions and intelligence in ways so inexplicable that it would almost justify the conception of life as an enchanted state. No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; an outrage on our dignity.

Which returns us to Fredric Jameson, who has recently contributed a small essay on an obscure Polish film adaptation of The Shadow-Line in the London Review of Books. Returning to Conrad's odd politics—his sentimental advocacy of labor from management's point of view; his refusal of Polish nationalism in the name of allegiance to the supra-national British Empire; his doubling of work as content (the described work of sailing) and form (the enacted labor of writing)—Jameson concludes,

To call all this "Toryism" is a gross oversimplication of a complicated existential situation, which obscures the political as well as the historical meaning of Conrad’s texts.

I agree. I think in Conrad we find—Chinua Achebe's famous, celebrated, but also regrettably demagogic and willfully oversimplified critique notwithstanding—the progenitor not only of the modern novel, but even of the postmodern and postcolonial novel. Consider the clear line of literary-historical influence, for instance, that runs from Conrad through Faulkner to García Márquez and then to Rushdie and Morrison—and this is without mentioning his haunting omnipresence in the work of Edward Said.

In an essay collected in the Norton Critical Edition, Peter Lancelot Mallios argues against Jameson's universalist Marxism in The Political Unconscious that Conrad, scion of the defeated Polish nobles, wrote on behalf of the conquered per se:

Jameson minimizes as personal...the very kind of "nonsynchronous overlap" that in postpartition Poland and the postbellum South—and, as [Edward] Said extends the analogy in the important essay "On Lost Causes," the more recent experience of many Palestinians, Vietnamese, Cubans, South Africans, Angolans, Armenians, American Indians, Tasmanians, Gypsies, and Jews—was a primary cultural mode...

Judging from his recent essay, Jameson appears to have come around to this argument. And if we bristle at finding the Confederacy grouped with the Vietnamese and the Palestinians, we might recall that Karl Marx praised Abraham Lincoln and the British in India for the same reason: from his point of view, both broke the settled order of regressively hierarchical societies, whether in the American South or the Global South. True, these northerly forces introduced new forms of hierarchy, but modern, rational, and centralized ones communism would be able easily to appropriate for the people. (This is why honest Marxists today, if any remain, celebrate corporate monopolization.)

In contrast to Marx and his ferociously progressivist descendants of all parties, Conrad speaks on behalf of those left behind, for good reasons and bad, in a world that prefers machines to men; he speaks for those battered by the storms and abandoned in the calms of an incomprehensible oceanic cosmos whose only possible justification or redemption is its weathering under the hand of an assiduous, if only human, artificer. In one of those historical ironies that perplexes mere reason, this backward art, this aesthetic conservatism, returns triumphant to the world stage in literature as the very essence and vanguard of the modern.

[María Eugenia · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5. Recopilación de historias y novelas cortas de Conrad. Lo empecé a leer por la historia de El duelo para ver la película... el año pasado. 😅
Me costó acabar el resto de historias porque en general no tienen una trama superatractiva, pero cada vez que lo retomaba para una historia nueva no paraba de pensar, pero qué bien escribe este señor, que me tiene aquí enganchada con esta historia de marineros/soldados/campesinos/caballeros que ni me caen bien. 😆

[accnt 1 · Rating 5 out of 5]

good book

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't usually read short stories, but then again, this is three in the space of 270 pages, so they're long enough to fit my allowed reading spans. Conrad is somebody I was taught to admire in college, but it's only been the last couple years that I was old enough to really appreciate his mastery of the English language, and his ability to dig deep into the humanity of his main characters, while keeping the others at a nicely symbolic level. The Secret Sharer is a nifty morality tale about a ship's captain protecting a murderer; Youth: A Narrative is a spectacular tale of horrors aboard a ship and the ways this could seem more exciting to a young man. But my fave is The Shadow Line, a brilliantly constructed story about a man making that leap into the next level of life and facing every possible obstruction in his path. Aboard a ship, of course - Conrad loved seamen. The racism is kept to a minimum in these stories, though of course the white men consider themselves superior to the Asians their predecessors have conquered. It only adds a level of moral terror beyond that intended by Conrad in the first place.

[Lyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another one of those books I read for class that I was most likely only one who felt an affinity towards. Another short read and not too action-packed. It's hard to review this without giving too much away, but there's a lot of dual personality references in here.

[Idiosyncratic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm surprised at how provocative (and evocative)I found this story to be - especially when I realized, upon re-reading it after many years - that "the secret sharer" was a murderer. (So much for my cozy, romantic preconception.)

[William Stobb · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The Secret Sharer" is one of my favorite stories. It takes place on a ship on the ocean, but it's also as if it takes place in the subconscious mind. It's dreamy. I loved it.

[Anh Gordon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Okay. Well. I was quite nervous when I saw this book in my reading list for the British Lit course. I hated _Heart of Darkness_ from the depths of my gut and thought that if Conrad was hailed for that, then there was no hope of me liking any of his other works. But like Jane Austen and _Emma_ I was stupendously and happily surprised.

I really liked this compilation! It started with _Youth: A Narrative_, then _Typhoon_, and finally _The Secret Sharer_. Each novella was different in one way or the other, though all took place on a boat traversing the ocean.

I was a little nervous with _Youth_ because this is where readers are introduced to Marlow, who was the story teller in _HOD_. But, outside of the "pass the bottle" lines which, for whatever reason, kept coming up, I enjoyed this story. _Typhoon_ was a little harder read, but once it got going, it was quite good. Readers may be a bit alarmed at the attitude towards the coolies, but I think, given the shifting POV from the captain to Jukes (and sometimes the omniscient narrator), we do see what the common thinking was at the time, not just toward those of a different ethnicity but just hired hands in general (lower ranks).

I enjoyed _The Secret Sharer_ the most. Not too surprising though, because I love good characterization, and I think this piece had the most character development. I really like how Conrad developed this character through his actions, so we don't see so much the character's thought processes and thus, must fill in the blanks. I suppose this is what Conrad did in _Typhoon_ as well, readers are left filling in a lot of gaps, but I love this technique as a way to keep readers continuing to think, even after finishing the book.

All in all, I would have to say, Conrad has redeemed himself in my eyes. I might...probably not but might...revisit _HOD_ as an older and hopefully wiser person. Perhaps being more familiar with Conrad's style might make _HOD_ a better read.

Anyway, I have to say, 4/5 stars. Good stuff, recommended for anyone looking for a short read, an interesting compilation of intriguing reads.

[cait · Rating 3 out of 5]

legatt as the page, the boat as the story....is this simply a story about the fear of writing? of not being able to write good books anymore? or is it simply a sailor's tale? is it a fear of the capitalistic drive that invaded the realm of writing stories? is this conrad relieving his anxieties in the only way he knows: writing? is writing always about writing? will writing sound and read as anything else but writing? will writing always somehow turn into marks on a page or will they just be physical representations of an invisible narrative?

[nijanth s · Rating 5 out of 5]

good book must read by all

[Joe Rousmaniere · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting study of a young man under pressure.

[vignesh · Rating 4 out of 5]

good one

[Manoel · Rating 3 out of 5]

If there’s a trait I have come to truly admire in Conrad is his sheer talent for drawing intense narratives from personal experiences or from stories he had heard in his days as a sailor. By the time I had finished "The Duel", which closes this collection, I realised what precisely amuses me about 19th-century literature that modern works will never be able to strike: simplicity, along with that personal touch.

There might be a small preconceived bias towards it when we tend to think of the depiction of the past as something as exotic and unimaginable as the discovery of new and unknown (opposite to the dull and boring present), but truth be told, modern authors tend to write about topics they only relate to or pity, and not necessarily what they know from experience. That leads to a massive and overwhelmingly unnecessary research to later present a work that poses either as propaganda or simply as something devoid of content. That is why I have been inclined to believe that empiricism in literature is essential for good literature, or, as Henry James advocated, that a text should first be realistic and contain a representation of life that is recognisable to its readers. What better way to successfully accomplish that if not by empirical findings on life and society?

There is also a second problem: either by the passage of time and its records, the consequences of the first problem or a combination of both, I see in modern writers a terrible trend of turning plots and themes more intricate and complex, which, in my opinion, deviates the reader from what the pivotal discussion should be about. And again, perhaps to make something “that is recognisable to its readers”, simplifying is the key, not the opposite. That is what I see in Conrad, as much difficult and confusing his language may be, tough.

And then we get to this collection of short stories. In it, there is indeed empiricism and simplicity. Naval stories such as "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'", "Typhoon" and "Youth" all have the personal touch from Conrad, they arise directly from his own experiences at the sea. And, personally, what makes him my favourite writer (and also an unparalleled one) is that he wrote true adventure novels because he lived true adventures. Acknowledging it is something that makes me admire him evermore. Others are ingenious precisely because they are simple: it is about betrayal in "The Lagoon", about secrecy in "The Secret Sharer" or plain and irrational animosity in "The Duel". They all become grand and magnificent not by complexity or esotericism, but by pure and unexpected frugality in their composition.

"The Duel" and "An Outpost for Progress" are easily the most interesting of this collection, while "The Idiots" and "The Informer" are placed on the opposite side. The latter feels morbid, drifting, just as The Secret Agent novel, most likely because both take a picture of a late 19th-century specific theme such as anarchism, but fails to transmit to us in modern times intentions behind their representatives.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In his essay, "The Condition of Art", Joseph Conrad says of the artist:

He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation--to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity"

His own art of storytelling though his novels and short stories demonstrates this artistic vision repeatedly; nowhere better than in his tale of The Secret Sharer. This is a short episode early in the career of an anonymous Captain of an anonymous ship in Southeast Asia near Siam. Only in his twenties on his first command, the Captain thought he was "somewhat of a stranger to myself", and he "wondered how far I should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly". It is with these thoughts in mind that in the midst of a mysterious black night he is surprised by a naked man climbing aboard the ship. It turns out to me a Mr. Leggatt, mate from the ship Sephora, who has escaped from that ship and his past actions which had culminated in his being responsible for the death of a ship-mate. The remainder of the story builds suspensefully to a climax in which the anonymous Captain finds out if he is capable of command and perhaps living up to some of the "ideal conception" that he has in mind. Leggat functions as a "double" for the Captain, being explicitly referred to as such even as he lives the life of a shadowy, even ghostly, double hidden in the Captains quarters. The tale suggests the internal struggle that comes with the first assumption of leadership and the need to create your own being through the experience of crisis. All this is draped in a story both mysterious and thought-provoking. The captain, in his anonymity, becomes every captain and everyman who has experienced the struggle toward an "ideal conception" of being.

[James Varney · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can see Conrad starting to flex his muscles with the two longer short stories here. Each concerns a coming of age, or the acquisition of real wisdom, what Conrad might call sea-wisdom, settling on the participants, and growing within them as the successive journeys unfold. These stories are tightly focused on the characters (particularly in "Narcissus"), although we still get wonderful glimpses of the ocean and its unchecked power and impersonal lethality. The full-blown, muscular snapshots of the jungle and the sea, or the jungle and a boat, as well as how each (along with the sun) work on the boat (and thus on man) will come later in the masterpiece novels. Here we have Conrad dealing almost exclusively with men on the sea and coping with what the sea throws at them, and almost much less of his psychological insights into how all this influences and illuminates how men behave with others.
In other words, there is a touch of Conrad-Lite to all this. But Conrad-Lite is so much better than full (virtually any author) that it still packs a reading haymaker. These come from a master storyteller, who gives the reader a clearer picture of what is happening that almost any of his modern peers. Again, these two stories underscore the truth that Conrad is among the very greats and is someone you can read with deep pleasure and genuine astonishment and admiration for life.

"The Secret Sharer" is almost another thing entirely. It's like Dostoyevsky's "The Double" or Poe's "William Wilson," and it's Conrad's psychological fiction at its peak. It can be read in a psychoanalytical frame, too, given Freud supporters would have a field day with a story about a doppelganger. All three of those "double" stories are wonderful, with "The Secret Sharer" falling in the middle in terms of length. It's not as funny as "The Double" but it is equally unnerving (and it has a happier ending!).

Highly, highly recommended.

[Julie Bozza · Rating 4 out of 5]

Warning: This review feels a little spoilerish, but then I think Conrad's style is to be quite upfront about his themes and meanings, which is also what I'm doing here.

I chose this to read because BBC 'Merlin' had an episode called 'The Secret Sharer', and I was interested by the unusual title. (I suppose there are more random reasons to read a book!) It was intriguing to consider the parallels while I was reading that story! :-)

These three substantially-sized stories are all worth reading, and offer a window into a life that Conrad has obviously lived.

In 'Youth: A Narrative', a man recounts the tale of a voyage - 'to Bangkok!' - in which everything that could possibly go wrong does go wrong. His younger self approaches all this direness as an adventure, and an opportunity to test himself and come up trumps. His older self, and the silent men to whom he's telling the story, mourn the loss of those blithely confident days.

'Typhoon' tells of exactly what it's like to sail through a typhoon - under the infuriatingly calmest of captains - and be subject to the unbelievable forces of such massive weather.

'The Secret Sharer' tells of a newly appointed young captain, a stranger on his own ship, who invites aboard a stowaway and hides him in his cabin. The stowaway was mate on another ship, and has murdered a man, but the captain sees him as his other self.

Well worth reading if you like tales of ships and the men who captain and crew them.

[Henrietta Fudakowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph Conrad is not a particularly easy author to read. He wrote in his third language English, but you can still feel the traces of his native Polish and his first learnt language French. So the sentences are dense, but they are also rich. If however you want somewhere to start reading Joseph Conrad's works Secret Sharer is a good place to start. Hearth of Darkness is better known, and is the basis for the film Apocalypse Now

Secret Sharer was first published a century ago, but the issues that it deals with are basically a young man's coming of age in a very difficult situation. The hero is a captain for the first time on a ship where the crew know each other well, he feels like a stranger on board until his 'secret sharer' comes on board and tells him that he is a murderer. The pressure of keeping another man secret on board and wondering what he would have done in the same situation is most of the plot.

A new film adaptation of the book is going to be released in June 2014, so it would be a good idea to read the book before seeing the film. Members of the Conrad society have suggested that although the film is updated to the present, it remains faithful to the spirit of Conrad's original novella

[Deb · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed "Youth: A Narrative" the best. This is a story of a young sailor at sea, and the ship he is sailing on continues to be haunted by misfortune. I liked this story the best. Conrad's writing style is a mix of quirky antiquity mixed with a bit of humor. I mean, this ship was doomed, but I got the impression that the writer is always finding the up side, and looking at it all with a bit of humor.

"Typhoon" was a drag. The story is about the perfect storm... The barometer drops to unbelievable depths-could it be right? The suggestion is to steer out of it, but the captain says they would be wasting coal. He then goes into his library, and reads about a storm in a book. This becomes his manual. The storm is described in detail...blah, blah, blah... I would rather watch it on "Deadliest Catch". The story ends quickly, and I am glad it is over.

"The Secret Sharer" is probably the worst story for me. I never could understand why the captain is willing to take the fugitive. Okay, so when he dresses in his pj's, he notices the resemblance. He is then in a conspiracy to ensure that no one gets wind that this man is on ship. Why was he complicit in this act in the first place? I think I missed the meaning of the story.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

YOUTH: A NARRATIVE — Normally, a title like that would be indicative of an absolute snoozefest, but this ended up being my favorite Conrad piece EVER. The story is that of a doomed ocean voyage, with Conrad taking a certain masochistic delight in inflicting as much damage upon the poor seagoing vessel as his fevered mind can dream up. It’s like torture porn for ships. Apart from that, Conrad also explores the relationship between courage and foolhardiness. Wonderfully written, with such on-the-nose descriptions as could only be penned by an author with firsthand experience. Five stars.

TYPHOON: Flat-out the best descriptions I’ve ever read of a ship caught up in a violent storm. Unfortunately, though, despite Conrad’s best efforts to convey excitement, this story reads like a dull slog. Three stars.

THE SECRET SHARER: A young captain on his first commanding voyage winds up harboring a fugitive, then goes to extraordinary lengths to conceal him from the crew. A gripping story, dripping with paranoia and psychological subtext. Four stars.

[Sasha (bahareads) · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

Note:#1 required reading
Note:#2 I only read The Secret Sharer

I'm not a fan of Joseph Conrad, having read Heart of Darkness by him. I found The Secret Sharer to be better than Heart of Darkness but still lacking something. The Secret Sharer was pretty bland & dry with a hint of something to keep me interested until the end.

[Charlie Shafer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The "Secret Sharer" and "Youth: A Narrative" were both great, captivating reads. You can finish reading both stories within an hour. His writing has always been so poetic and he showcases this writing style in both Youth and the Secret Sharer. Youth contained some of the most existential and beautiful writing I've ever encountered. The second story in the collection didn't grip me and I never finished it.

[Angie · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's something vaguely magical about Conrad's ships. The Secret Sharer is definitely the best, but Youth: A Narrative is pretty decent. Typhoon was a tad boring, though. The Captain wasn't dynamic or interesting and some of the ship descriptions were perhaps too technical for modern readers.

[Humphrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Youth" is distinctly the best story here - very good stuff. I thought "The Secret Sharer" was about as well executed as it could have been, but wasn't all that impressive. "Typhoon" is a bit problematic: the length that allows Conrad to make it a great descriptive story, but cuts against the epiphany aspect of the form.

[GM · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subtle and elegant short story. It is yet another spin to one of
Conrad's favourite themes: the hardship that one sometimes
faces in the process of doing the "right" thing, of taking the right stand,
sorrounded by an environment where so many people are blinded
by their greed, material interest, lack of understanding of the world.
Top notch, as almost everything from Conrad.

[Scott Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this to be one of the more haunting Joseph Conrad stories; one that I can remember decades after my first reading. The story involves a sea captain who discovers a mysterious swimmer clinging to the side of the boat. Later we learn more about the swimmer's secret: the "brand of Cain" that he must bear. The swimmer becomes, in some way, the captain's double. A captivating story!

[A · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found this book good but not extraordinary. I find a great book one that I can remember after I have read it and has impacted me for better or worse. After reading selected passages it reminded me of "Moby Dick" in subject only slightly more like Hemingway in style.

[Rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

Conrad and I simply never clicked. I never really like his over use of description and attempts at suspense. This book is one of the few with the doppelganger motif and he leaves things rather vague in this respect, and put bluntly, it seemed rather a story about nothing much.