My dad picked this book up at a garage sale on a semi-informed whim. Of course I’d heard of Conrad (but never read anything by him) and “Lord Jim'' has a good ring to it, so, the shape of the penguin modern classic being good, I snagged from him for the whole 50 cents he spent on it and put it on my shelf with no intention of reading it soon. However, sometimes there are these books that just intuitively seem like a pleasure to read through, or possibly they look like they’d be nice or a change of pace to hold. Lord Jim was one of these books and I ended up grabbing it for a vacation read while I was in Mexico city. Of course all of this veneer quickly fades when you're then tasked with reading through this kinda prickly, 300 page book.
The first thing that was striking to me was the prose. It sticks out as unconventionally beautiful and somewhat awkward. After reading the Conrad wiki page, I think this all makes sense since english was not his first language. I could see a high school student being unconsciously puzzled by some of the strange turns of phrase and sentence structure that Conrad employs here, but I think any reflection reveals that his style is no less than a unique perspective on a language that often you can forget is being used every day by authors, often in a dull or predictable way, and it’s a nice change of pace to feel Conrad pry at some of the floor boards to wield the language his way.
The other thing that struck me, although not immediately, was the story's structure, which is surprisingly modern. I guess I should have assumed that a revered author from the edge of the 19th and 20th centuries would have that modern bend, but I guess I assumed that Conrad was more of a stories, philosophical, or political author than a style author. I think he’s all of these things, but his style might be the most striking, leaving out important details, jumping back and forth in time, using narrators within narrators within narrators to tell this story which always reveals something more. And, maybe most striking, his style is extremely impressionistic. Not in a way that is gaudy, like the beats, but in a way that truly leaves you with an impression of what is happening, but not much more, giving the book a psychological dimension.
The story itself is about a young man named Jim who works on a passenger ship, his ship sinks, and he jumps ship. But his ship doesn’t actually sink, and he’s put on trial along with his crewmates. Jim takes this hard and blames himself, even if he gets out of the courts with a slap on the wrist, and he exiles himself on these islands in south east asia. One of the narrators of the story tries to help Jim, which eventually brings Jim to an island where the natives live in relative seclusion, and Jim takes refuge there. Jim quickly becomes a semi-godlike figure and is revered in the town. Things again nosedive when bandits show up and end up killing the tribe leader’s only son. Again, Jim places the blame for this, but this time the tribe leader, on Jim’s confessions of guilt, executes Jim with his flintlocks.
The story is good and there are a few things I could likely pull out of it, but I do think it might be one of the weaker parts of the book (it’s not as weak as the characters which I think the style doesn’t let breathe). The summary that I’ve is, I think, pretty complete, for being about a millionth of the length of the book, which is to say that the book drags in parts. As I mentioned earlier, the book is always giving you information that you didn’t previously have, but me framing it in that way, “giving you information that you didn’t previously have”, should potentially be a red flag that things are moving too slow. As per wikipedia, I think this was one of the main complaints of the book, but Conrad replied to them saying that the core parts of the story are fairly brief and not drawn out, it is only some of the side details that bloat things up, and Conrad doesn’t seem to see any problems with that.
I’m glad I read this book. I think that it’s given me some perspective on English literature and style, but I don’t think I’m rushing out to buy another Conrad book just yet, though I’ve got my eye on Nostromo. The book also has the quality of authenticity in that Conrad pulls from a lot of real sources and was himself a worker on ships throughout his life. So whereas Proust and Dickens are stuck in pedestrian England and France, Conrad is really doing it, and I do think that accounts for a lot in conjunction with his already class writing.