欧宝娱乐

Lord Jim is an incredibly frustrating book. It's part imperial adventure, part psychological study, in the vein of Joseph Conrad's most famous work, Heart of Darkness. However, whereas Heart was brief and elegant, Lord Jim is a repetitive slog. I spent as much time trying to figure out who was telling the story as I did actually enjoying the story.

The book tells of the eponymous Jim, who is a mate aboard the merchant ship Patna, which is carrying hundreds of Muslim pilgrims. Mid-voyage, the ship has engine trouble, and then starts taking on water. A squall is coming. The captain and crew is convinced that the Patna is going to sink. They are equally convinced that telling the pilgrims of this fact will start a panic resulting in all their deaths. So the brave captain and his hearty men depart the ship in a lifeboat. Jim follows suit.

The only problem: the ship doesn't sink. Later, it is towed into harbor, with no loss of life. The crew of the Patna, Jim included, go on trial before the shipping board. Eventually, he loses his sailing certificate. Of all the men, only Jim seems ashamed. And he is really ashamed. I mean pathological. Most of this book is devoted to his all-consuming wallow.

The story is told in typical Conrad fashion, by which I mean it utilizes every contrivance known to LOST. The first section of the book is written in the third-person. This was my favorite part. It was fast-moving, uncluttered, and clear. Then Marlow, the loquacious raconteur from Heart of Darkness shows up and starts spinning his story. Apparently recovered from the jaundice he got searching for Kurtz, Marlow is in the mood to talk. And talk. And talk. He's the quintessential drunk uncle on Thanksgiving. Long after everyone else has fallen asleep watching the Dallas game, he's still there, wine in hand, telling you the same thing for the fourth time.

This was my first view of Jim. He looked as unconcerned and unapproachable as only the young can look. There he stood, clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on...

The next roughly two-thirds of the book is told in first person by Marlow. This section utilizes nested dialogue, so that Marlow will be relating a story in which a person within that story is also relating a story. (The number of unreliable narrators in Lord Jim is astounding). When you look at a page, you see a mass of quotation marks. It all gets very confusing. Just to make it more confusing, every once in awhile the book will jump back to third-person. Then the book ends with a letter(!) written by Marlow to an unnamed man who'd been listening to the original story.

It was the nested dialogue that did me in. There's really no reason why you have to use quotation marks as Marlow tells his story. It would've been much simpler to just shift the book from third to first person while Marlow talks, instead of working Marlow's extended monologue into the third-person format, requiring the use of quotation marks inside quotation marks. For whatever reason, Conrad is insistent on jamming these essentially first-person narratives into third-person. This choice wasn't a big deal in Heart of Darkness because the framing device was much simpler: start by introducing Marlow; Marlow tells his story; end with Marlow finishing story. In Lord Jim, it's a much bigger problem, because the narrative is jumping all over the place. There are stories told within stories; at times it's like opening a Russian nesting doll. There are dozens of tangents and digressions and trying to keep straight who's doing the talking - whether it's Marlow or Jim or some other characters - requires constant attention.

I was also disappointed by how repetitive this book was. Marlow takes an interest in Jim, for reasons I can only surmise (old man obsessed with young man...oh I'll just stop), and tries to get him a job. Jim takes the job, does a good job, then quits whenever the Patna is brought up. So Marlow gets Jim another Job, Jim does a good job...etc.

Finally, Marlow, through the help of his friend Stein, finds Jim employment on the island of Patusan, in the Malay Archipelago. Here, Jim becomes a benevolent Kurtz and earns his honorific "Lord." He falls in love with a mixed-race girl named Jewel, becomes friends with Dain Waris, a chief's son, and generally seems content (though he will never stop brooding about his moment of cowardice, to the point where I wanted to slap the taste right out of his mouth). The finale comes when a buccaneer named Gentleman Brown invades Patusan and Jim shows that a man's character is indeed his fate.

There are parts to like about Lord Jim. Conrad is a great writer, and it almost goes without saying that if you read this book, you will find masterful descriptions, colorful imagery, and incisively wielded similes.

Every morning the sun, as if keeping pace in his revolutions with the progress of the pilgrimage, emerged with a silent burst of light exactly at the same distance astern of the ship, caught up with her at noon, pouring the concentrated fire of his rays on the pious purposes of the men, glided past on his descent, and sank mysteriously into the sea evening after evening, preserving the same distance ahead of her advancing bows...The awnings covered her deck with a white roof from stem to stern, and a faint hum, a low murmur of sad voices, alone revealed the presence of a crowd of people upon the great blaze of the ocean. Such were the days, still, hot, heavy, disappearing one by one into the past, as if falling into an abyss of ever open in the wake of the ship; and the ship, lonely under a wisp of smoke, held on her steadfast way black and smoldering in a luminous immensity, as if scorched by a flame flicked at her from a heaven without pity. The nights descended on her like a benediction.