Word: conrad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Today Conrad has replaced Victor Hugo. A similar survey of contemporary writers would turn up many of the master's titles: An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim, Typhoon, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and his greatest story, Heart of Darkness. His ominous Slavic intensity and his understated English produced a prose style that generations have found intoxicating. Countless youths acquired their first sense of literary power in such passages as "When an opportunity offered at last to meet my predecessor, the grass growing through his ribs was tall enough to hide his bones...
Congo Diary traces the first autobiographical flutters of that sentence from Heart of Darkness. After more than ten years as a seaman and officer in the British merchant navy, Conrad signed a three-year contract with a Belgian company to serve on river steamboats that plied the Congo River. "Like an empty Huntley and Palmer biscuit tin" was his description of boats like...
Belges, the double-decked stern-wheeler that he sailed up to Stanley Falls. Heart of Darkness conveys the dwarfing effect that the 1,000-mile journey must have had on the 32-year-old Conrad: "Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico...
...part of the Diary known as the "Upriver Book," Conrad is all business, the professional sailor noting the course for those who will come after: "Always keep the high mountain ahead crossing over to the left bank. To port of highest mount a low black point. Opposite a long island stretching across. The shore is wooded...
Among those whom Conrad met in the Congo was Roger Casement...