Lord Jim

Written by Joseph Conrad

Narrated by Joss Ackland

‘Who could tell what forms, what visions, what faces, what forgiveness he could see in the glow of the west!’

Jim is a well-bred young romantic who takes to the seas with hopes of adventure and the aspiration to prove his mettle. When the boat he sails in threatens to sink, Jim abandons ship in fear in order to save himself, leaving the other passengers to their fate. However, the ship does not sink and guilt-ridden Jim admits to the maritime court of inquiry that he deserted the boat and is consequently stripped of his sailing papers. Blighted by his own cowardice, Jim’s subsequent self-exile to a remote Malaysian trading post gives Conrad the opportunity to explore the question of moral identity and through his hero, he embodies the values and deterioration of the declining empire of late Victorian Britain. With its rich descriptions of an unknown, exotic world and beautifully constructed prose, Lord Jim is considered one of Conrad’s greatest works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Jun 15, 2005
• ISBN: 9780007225149

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) was a Polish-British writer, regarded as one of the greatest novelists in the English language. Though he was not fluent in English until the age of twenty, Conrad mastered the language and was known for his exceptional command of stylistic prose. Inspiring a reoccurring nautical setting, Conrad’s literary work was heavily influenced by his experience as a ship’s apprentice. Conrad’s style and practice of creating anti-heroic protagonists is admired and often imitated by other authors and artists, immortalizing his innovation and genius.

Reviews for Lord Jim

[maxernst11 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Intrigerend en meeslepend. Qua constructie duidelijke tweedeling: incident met de Patria en leven in PatusanCentraal: gewetensconflict van Jim en hoe hij dat probeerde recht te zetten door elders ?goed? te doen en grootheid te bereikenOp achtergrond ook imperialisme-kolonialisme debat: niet zo heel duidelijk wel standpunt Conrad inneemt (zeker niet politiek); wel cultureel: nefaste invloed van westerse inmenging op locale cultuur, maar die wordt zeker niet als model gesteld

[lucybrown_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Lord Jim has haunted me most of my adult life. Jim's would be heroic saga was the one assigned book that I did not read entirely. The one book for which I resorted to using Cliff notes. The horror! I royally botched the test; well at least by my standards I did. I can't explain my failure to make it through the novel. Conrad is one of my favorite writers. Whatever the reason, I have felt badly about it ever since.

On this second reading, I found more reason to push through it, though I admit that at times I needed the impetus of a recording, a remarkably bad livrovox recording. I found the story slow going though enjoyable in a vaguely painful way. I suppose there is an immature part of my psyche that wants to understand Jim as heroic, as Conrad's answer to Billy Budd, but he simply isn't. He is the product of such adventure stories; he is a would be Billy or Quee-quegg but ultimately he lacks the moral resolve. There is no reason for me to expect this. Marlowe makes it clear from the beginning that Jim is not heroic. Yet, Marlowe sees the possibility of his being such. In the end, Marlowe is as perplexed as I am as what to make of Jim or his story. In the end Jim is much like most of us.

Also, there were times I wish Marlowe would just shut up. He seems to drone on and on.

[spikesix · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Lord Jim. Turn to any page in this book and you will find breathtaking descriptions of a man's demeanour or facial expressions when struggling to come to a decision. The passages on seascapes and cloud castles in the sky, hanging dark and ominous, are brilliant.The problem is, that is all there is. The wordplay is such that the story, if it can be so termed, is lost under it's weight. Metaphorically, we have a passer-by here who is asked, “Did you see anything?” The next five pages in this long book describe his face as he forms his reply. The following three pages, his clothes and the condition of his hard used shoes. After some talk of his mother who sewed seam after seam to keep from starving for a few pages, the man forms his reply: “No.” That is his only part in the book, we have just spent an evening reading about him .. .. .. and so it goes on .. .. ..To keep this review shorter than the book, I find it best to take this tome down from time to time and read a page or two to marvel at Conrad’s ability to conjure magic with words. I would love to read the whole thing from cover to cover but have only ever got half-way before losing interest. There are too many wonderful books waiting on my shelves, some by Joseph Conrad, to waste time floundering in this one.However, even if you only read the first few pages or the last, you will have to agree it is well worth five whole stars.

[bkohl_6 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lord Jim is a tale of honor lost and regained — a sort of adventure on the high seas with unsavory pirates and official Inquiries and almond-eyed damsels in distress. The narrator turns over the meaning of honor as he describes Jim's life, alternately sympathizing and feeling aversion, and never coming to a judgment, about Jim in particular and about honor in general. Jewel's misery and appeals to fight are challenges to this particular brand of honor (although since she's female and non-white, and this is 1900, her challenge is pretty feeble).Jim has a stubborn insistence in his own redemption by sticking it out. He seems to regard answering for his actions as both the most excruciating punishment and the only way to live with himself. While the external drama regarding society's official judgment of him plays out, he is concerned only with the personal — explaining himself to one sympathetic listener, appearing every day at the Inquiry, answering to Doramin.

[josmith16 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This books was hard to get through, Joseph Conrad has a very extensive vocabulary and I found myself using the dictionary quite often. The action was very parse in it's delivery and I found Conrad rambling on about useless information which cause me to have to read some chapters multiple times. I haven't really decided on if I liked his narrator telling the story to another character, it was like a character in the book reading a book to you. I thought it was really easy to lose contact with who was speaking. I have a hard time considering that this is considered one of the 100 greatest books of all times. My assumption is that their must not be very many good books in general. However, after stating all of this, I did find the boy some what entertaining. It was separated into three distinct areas: the trial, a wandering period and the island. I did not really fully get the antagonist, Lord Jim himself, as representing the main insight of this novel or as a physiological self-examining exploration as some reviews have suggested the book explores. Not that I don't see some of that in the novel, but I saw the book as expression of the world surround Tuan Jim and how self involved and critical the world is.

[m.belljackson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Individual characters are exquisitely, yet interminably, rendered. Descriptions of nature are vast and compelling "in the appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations."Lord Jim is a slow moving psychological drama with confusion: who hit the dead guy on the ship? who locked the people in? who let them out? why was Jim a coward when he was the one wholoosened the rafts overboard so people could jump in? was Captain Robinson really the same lone surviving Robinson Crusoe and could he really have eaten his fellow survivors?!?And why does Jim offer himself as a suicide sacrifice? Does that really help and protect his people? And isn't he again a coward for breaking his promise to his lover?

[theampersand · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Reading Joseph Conrad sometimes feels downright intimidating. Every one of his stentences is so erudite, so perfectly formed, and so detailed that it's hard to even imagine how he -- or anyone else -- might improve on it. Conrad just might be the platonic ideal of an English-language prose stylist, and he's so good that he can be scary. At the same time, I'm glad that there are plenty of authors who don't write like him. His stuff can be dense and slow; I suspect that some authors could reel off three novels and two short stories in the space it takes Conrad to get things exactly right in one. "Lord Jim," then, is vintage Conrad. It's dense and weighty and immaculately written -- each one of its chapters seems so perfectly self-contained might as well be a short story in itself. It covers much of the same ground, in a sort of roundabout way, that he would revisit in his more widely read "Heart of Darkness." At the center is Jim himself, a curiously hollow character whose likable exterior conceals an eerie emptiness and makes him particularly unsuited for life in the East. It's often been said that it's this concern with interiority that marks Conrad as a modernist writer, and I'd agree. In a sense, though, the novel's most original and intriguing modernist figure is Stien, an organized, perceptive mentor to the book's narrator who, in my eyes, bears a striking resemblence to Sigmund Freud. This is all the more astonishing when one considers that "Lord Jim" was written at about the time that "The Interpretation of Dreams" was published. "Lord Jim" has many of the pleasures that you find in other Conrad novels -- the author's familiarity with the exclusive fraternity of experienced seamen makes one the reader feel part of a privileged circle, and there are some lovely period details for readers who find the age of sail, or the age of empires, romantic and exciting."Lord Jim," like many of Conrad's books, is told through a complex and effective narrative frame and it's an undeniable pleasure to spend some time with Marlowe, his favorite narrator, who is at once one of the most charming and the most throughtful men who ever sailed the fictional seas. There are, I admit, some equally familiar Conrad problems in "Lord Jim," too. Women and non-Europeans are portrayed mostly passive or pitiful and, as sordid as Jim's tale is, I'm not sure that the project of empire as a whole is really ever put up for debate. Still, it'd be difficult to argue that "Lord Jim" isn't a prose masterpiece and a good -- perhaps even great -- novel. It is recommended to patient readers in search of a book that is both challening and curiously engrossing.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good book and perhaps disturbing in that it chronicles a man with a romantic view on life and himself, but when the finger points to him he falls short. Perhaps there is a bit of Jim in all of us. Superbly written narrative, it is hard to believe that English isn't his first language.

[coach_of_alva · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I first read this book when I was thirteen, which of course was too young. Conrad’s novel is about a young English lad full of Victorian ideals and zeal who fails his first opportunity to be a hero very badly and goes to his death when his second opportunity is ruined. I liked the first half of the novel the best, which described in the lush psychological detail I love how Jim failed, how he reacted to his failure, and how he tried to find a new place and a new purpose. I was not as pleased with the second half, where Jim turned an island backwater into a mini-Eden until a serpent entered it. Conrad tried to ground this section in realism but I couldn’t help feeling that the author was becoming as romantic as his hero. I admired his villain, a psychopath of Shakespearian proportions, but winced at the inevitable primitive girl who provides the love interest. What I loved about all was Conrad’s prose, always soothing the heart, stimulating the soul, demanding and rewarding attention. I rarely found affected or overdone.

[pickwick817 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In a similar way to "Nostromo" which I recently read, I struggled through the first half of the book. Things seemed to move very slowly as Conrad introduced his characters. Several chapters would pass in one conversation, and I would stop reading for a day or two, then pick it up again and assume one character was a part of the conversation, only to find out at the end of the chapter that it was another character. A little frustrating, but worth it because I really enjoyed the last half of the book, (again like Nostromo). What I like most about this book is the depth to which Conrad thinks through each characters personality and individual motivation in the plot. Its really a lesson in human pschychology, and group dynamics.

[kirmuriel-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

He is indeed romantic. He is more idealist than Julian (The Red and the Black).
Conrad's narrative is impressive.
After finishing: very very sad, I almost cried. Why don't the authors leave their characters alone!!! Foken Brown!

[miguelnunonave · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting book on colonialism and travelling. But it dwells in so many details and the structure is so dense that it becomes a real chore to try and read it.

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As in Heart of Darkness and some of his short fiction, Conrad has a man named Marlow narrate the story to a group of contemporaries. Here we learn of Jim, an earnest and able young seaman who, at least in his own eyes, betrays the moral code he was born under, and spends the rest of his life trying to put that failure behind him and atone for it.As first mate on a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims to Mecca, Jim is on night watch when the vessel strikes something, possibly the floating remains of a wreck, and begins taking on water. In the ensuing confusion, Jim's conscience is wracked--there are clearly not enough lifeboats to save all the passengers and crew. Most of the pilgrims are asleep and unaware of the danger. Should they be alerted, or allowed to go peacefully down with the ship? What is Jim to do? The captain and other officers having already made the decision to abandon the ship, they urge Jim to join them in their lifeboat. Although he does not make a conscious decision to do so, he finds himself in the lifeboat with them, having mindlessly jumped or been pitched over the side by the violent motion of the ship. Regardless of the "facts" so vehemently demanded by the official inquiry later on, this is an outcome for which Jim can never forgive himself. Ultimately he removes himself from civilization, with the help of Marlow and his contacts, finding a sort of refuge among native people in a remote village, presumably somewhere in Indonesia, where he brings an end to a local conflict and finally seems to have escaped the shadow of his past. To the grateful inhabitants, he has become Tuan (Lord) Jim. But (no surprise) this is only a relatively happy interlude in the man's full life story.The novel is full of the descriptive passages Conrad did so well, of symbolism and philosophical musing, and of diversions from the main tale. The latter are never irrelevant, but some are more engaging than others. The reader is always getting Jim's story from at least one remove, as Marlow does not have personal knowledge of all of it himself. Nevertheless, he takes a life-long interest in Jim, feeling it is his duty to tell and interpret what he does know, to dispel rumors and assumptions among his fellow sailors, and to somehow "understand" Jim, who despite being "one of us", had repeatedly behaved otherwise. Taken down to its bones, this is a pretty simple, almost Shakespearean, tale of guilt, penance and retribution, with enough ambiguity and social commentary thrown in to make it very interesting.Reviewed February 2017

[russellbittner · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Difficult to follow. I'm currently reading an early edition, which may have a lot to do with the difficulty.

[endersreads · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"He's one of us". Should you be familiar with Marlow, Tuan Jim, Stein, Conrad himself; you know very well what this means. Lord Jim is a story of a hero fallen, a hero risen, and a hero sacrificed. Perhaps hero is to strong a word. A man. Marlow meets Jim whilst he is in the courts relating the story of the Patna--the ship which Jim and several other dubious characters abandoned in fear--a failure of their duty. This haunts Jim eternally--he runs from his past incessantly. Marlow is the guiding hand of wisdom in Jim's life. Eventually Jim comes to Patusan, where he finds a redemption of sorts, Love, and all else he has ever dreamed for. Conrad's prose is as deep as the waters his words are masterfully set forth upon. Marlow's encounter with the aging Stein was simply stunningly and hauntingly beautiful. The glimpse into Steins past reminds me of a shining chivalrous character of Tennyson or MacDonald. It is a fitting fate that Jim's wife, Jewel, should end up residing with Stein. Absorb this, Conrad's experience of letters, and have your conscious and unconscious irreparably altered for the better.

[jerry2book-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Classic tale of one man's redemption the "hard" way

[carterchristian1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you love a sea story you can't resist this. Has it all, handsome white,young sailor, British empire, starcrossed lovers, swashbuckling, wonderful descriptions. Loved it, old as the tale is.

[auntieknickers · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Here's another one that I read, wrote a paper on, and don't really remember much about. This Guardian list is not only giving me a lot of books to read, but a surprising number to reread.

[tess_schoolmarm · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I read 10/45 chapters and in two words: boring, monotonous! Tis the story of the sea and a ship sinking or not and the inquest and it was just awful! Conrad is excessively verbose, I could not ascertain a plot, and slogging through this has already killed too many brain cells. 1 star. I know it's a classic, but really!

[wagner5sarah35 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I struggled a lot to get through this book and I liked it less the more I read. It is a very interesting book, however, in terms of its themes and philosophy. Jim is an incredibly human character, who must live with the shame and guilt of his mistakes in a very stratified world of British seamanship and imperialism. My primary compliant is that this is a very psychological novel but the author never really gets into the main character's head.

[bexaplex · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Lord Jim is a tale of honor lost and regained — a sort of adventure on the high seas with unsavory pirates and official Inquiries and almond-eyed damsels in distress. The narrator turns over the meaning of honor as he describes Jim's life, alternately sympathizing and feeling aversion, and never coming to a judgment, about Jim in particular and about honor in general. Jewel's misery and appeals to fight are challenges to this particular brand of honor (although since she's female and non-white, and this is 1900, her challenge is pretty feeble).Jim has a stubborn insistence in his own redemption by sticking it out. He seems to regard answering for his actions as both the most excruciating punishment and the only way to live with himself. While the external drama regarding society's official judgment of him plays out, he is concerned only with the personal — explaining himself to one sympathetic listener, appearing every day at the Inquiry, answering to Doramin.

[kishields · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Nice edition with copious notes and a decent introduction. The book moves along nicely in the beginning and the end, but becomes quite dense and slow in the middle. Tuan Jim finds his path to glory after a stumble in his youth, and snatches redemption in the end by facing up at last to his fatal flaw. Marlow narrates and provides the contrasting viewpoint of an older, more jaded, observer, who can still recall his own young, romantic ideals.

[kcshankd · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Read as I revisit Conrad from front to back. This is the culmination of his early novels - many familiar threads from the works up to this one, right up to the long Marlowe monologue. Conrad's ambivalence to race, especially compared to the time he was writing, stands out to the modern reader.

[akblanchard_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Way back when I was in high school, my English class had to read Lord Jim. None of us students liked it. The English teacher suggested that this was a book we should reread in middle age; we would understand better what it means to be "one of us" then. So now, in memory of this teacher, I took up the challenge and reread Lord Jim as a mature adult. I didn't like it any better the second time around. The novel's plot is simple: the maritime career of a young British man named Jim is ruined after he and his fellow crew members desert a sinking ship. Jim's shame at his own cowardice drives him ever eastward, and he finally settles on a remote Indonesian island. There the natives revere him as the white man with all the answers. Then the outside world, in the form of a motley band of robbers, intrudes. The narrative, which is told from multiple perspectives, features page-long paragraphs and sentences with multiple semi-colons, not to mention lots of French and German phrases and nineteenth-century nautical terms. At least the individual chapters are short.The declaration that Jim is "one of us" occurs in several places. The phrase means different things in different contexts, but the overarching idea is that Jim is a "romantic". However, unless I missed something, the term "romantic" remains undefined.Lord Jim is a literary classic. I am glad that I gave it another try, but I still failed to find much to appreciate in it.

[dtal_7 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Hard to go through the narrative form of the story. The first 30 chapters are tedious and the tale flows slowly for my taste. Conrad dives into many details and goes hence and forth in time. This book demanded from me a great deal of concentration. In spite of this, the "finale" was a compensation for all this.

[ben_a_11 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have been slowly re-reading this book through the month of November. Lord Jim has always been a touchstone novel for me. The first time I read it, I was chilled right through. This seemed to me the way my life was likely to go wrong: indulging my imagination with haze of possible heroism while funking, decisively, the one time I was truly tested. Coming back, years later, none of that power is lost. And I am more conscious of jsut how impossibly fine a writer Conrad is. I suspect one reason it has been slow going for me is that I have in my professional life become adept at the semi-skim mode of reading. Fast, quick, and 95%. You can't read Conrad that way. 12.03.06, and follwing. Recommended more than almsot anything.

[_eskarina · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Some restless notes:1) Structure of writing. Sophisticated/complicated structure of narration is imho the first problem reader has to deal with. Although the story is in principle quite simple, it is divided into several layers and it is sometimes difficult to switch from one to another without getting lost. But once you accustome yourself to the text, it becomes readable :). This makes the text „thick“ (at least in my case, the book exhausted me a lot more than other ones and after reading 10 pages I had the feeling like having read 30. It was somehow similar to Mann’s Doctor Faustus, you have to dwell on it, because it does not allow you to go further without thorough understanding.)2) It seems to be tedious, from time to time. The interpretation implicit in the text itself (author’s intention maybe) is unclear, which - again - makes the book more complicated. But it has a great advantage: on one hand, Marlow (the narrator) is uncompromisingly strict to Jim, on the other he tries to understand Jim‘s motives and even justifies him. And this gives the text fabulous tension; you are confronted with two polar standpoints, but none has the priority, the „truth“.3) That leads me to the final question: is Lord Jim a novel about redemption (honour lost and regained), or about selfishness? It is not to be decided „once and forever“, nor the „right“ answer is to be found. With my personal preferences and opinions, I would insist, that Jim could not act differently; one’s personal „existence“ (Existenz in Karl Jaspers‘ conception) is the base layer he is responsible for and everything else is to be derived from it. Jim could not act differently :).

[nielspeterqm · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Classic, now almost immortal, literary enhancement of the 19th Century colonial, adventure & coming-of-age novels. Having dishonoured himself by cowardice at sea, the protagonist Jim finally lands in the small, withdrawn realm of Patusan, where his wilful heroism lifts a local tribe from misery & oppression, only to choke its future all the more completely when his past & demons catch up with him. Shows the West's colonial paternalism in both its most radiant, exalted light & in its most ineradicable flaws - all by exposing the composite nature of humanity itself, of a single man, himself flawed, in fullest strength & despairing frailty.

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Conrad pits a flawed man against the primitive where he reigns in honor, while those of his kind hold him out as a coward. He tries to redeem himself and loses his life a better man. Always a good read and a gifted writer.

[auntmarge64 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Good lord, this book is boring. At it's core is a wonderful tale of youth, cowardice, courage and redemption, but this is brutally buried by the narrator's need to philosophize and expound on his own feelings at each twist and turn of the story, for all that he isn't even present for most of it. Conrad may have succeeded here in single-handedly popularizing the "enough about me, what do you think of me?" trope. I loved [Heart of Darkness] and began this with anticipation, but after dragging myself halfway through I gave up in disgust. I have only so many hours to live and read, after all.