Typhoon and Other Stories (Everyman's Library)
Joseph Conrad
Language: English
Pages: 416
ISBN: 067940547X
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Joseph Conrad’s long experience as a working seaman enriched and deepened his literary gifts, making him the most brilliant and convincing writer of seafaring’s greatest age. In the three sea stories collected here, he makes deft use of the maritime setting to enact moral dramas of men tested by the elements and by one another.
“The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’” has been hailed as Conrad’s earliest masterpiece. When a West Indian sailor on board the merchant ship Narcissus falls ill his condition sparks conflict among the crew, which threatens to erupt in mutiny under the pressure of a terrifying gale. “Typhoon,” the gripping story of a steamship captain who stubbornly steers into a major tempest and the crew’s ensuing struggle to survive the raging waters, is distinguished by one of the most thrillingly evoked storms in all of literature. “The Shadow-Line” is a dramatically fictionalized account of Conrad’s first command as a young sea captain trapped aboard a becalmed, fever-wracked, and seemingly haunted ship—an ordeal that marks for him the “shadow-line” between youth and maturity. Suspenseful, atmospheric, and deceptively simple, this intense story reflects the complex themes of Conrad’s most famous novels, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.
With an introduction by Martin Seymour-Smith
Imperial China, the wearing of the pigtail was not a matter of fashion but obligatory. Although living abroad, the coolies here have maintained the custom. 9. Celestial: A Chinese person, possibly with some mild humour implied in the usage; from the ‘Celestial Empire’ with its ‘Celestial Emperor’, translations into English of the name of the Chinese nation and its paramount leader. 10. sticks of incense: Joss sticks, used in invoking the gods’ favour as well as in Buddhist rituals and on
movements, a hint of elbows spread out, of a head thrown up. Captain MacWhirr was trying to do up the top button of his oilskin coat with unwonted haste. The hurricane, with its power to madden the seas, to sink ships, to uproot trees, to overturn strong walls and dash the very birds of the air to the ground, had found this taciturn man in its path, and, doing its utmost, had managed to wring out a few words. Before the renewed wrath of winds swooped on his ship, Captain MacWhirr was moved to
caused you to fall a musing in a strain of pagan piety. Excellent Mrs. Hermann’s baggy cotton gowns had some sort of rudimentary frills at neck and bottom, but this girl’s print frocks hadn’t even a wrinkle; nothing but a few straight folds in the skirt falling to her feet, and these, when she stood still, had a severe and statuesque quality. She was inclined naturally to be still whether sitting or standing. However, I don’t mean to say she was statuesque. She was too generously alive; but she
whale driven into a shallow cove in a coast. He stood up; he flung himself down headlong; he tried to tear the cushion with his teeth; and again hugging it fiercely to his face he let himself fall on the couch. The whole ship seemed to feel the shock of his despair; and I contemplated with wonder the lofty forehead, the noble touch of time on the uncovered temples, the unchanged hungry character of the face—so strangely ascetic and so incapable of portraying emotion. What should he do? He had
winked not in the least vulgarly; his thin red face, with a well-modelled curved nose, had a sort of distinction—the more so that when he talked to her he looked with a steadier and more intelligent glance. A handsome, hale, upright, capable man, with a white beard. You did not think of his age. His son, he affirmed, had resembled him amazingly from his earliest babyhood. Harry would be one-and-thirty next July, he declared. Proper age to get married with a nice, sensible girl that could