{"id":8016,"date":"2020-10-18T20:47:05","date_gmt":"2020-10-18T18:47:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/?p=8016"},"modified":"2020-10-25T07:32:37","modified_gmt":"2020-10-25T06:32:37","slug":"der-niemand-von-der-narcissus-joseph-conrad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/2020\/10\/the-n-of-the-narcissus-joseph-conrad\/","title":{"rendered":"The N. from the \"Narcissus\" \u2022 Joseph Conrad"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I\u2019m not really a collector, and apart from books I don\u2019t hoard things. And even with books, I\u2019m not someone who needs to own everything from a series. One exception is the mare classics<\/a>. These beautiful bibliophile volumes always come with outstanding production values and consistently convince with their content. They\u2019re always classics by major authors with a strong connection to the sea. I\u2019ve never been disappointed here, so I own every book that has appeared in the series so far. Joseph Conrad hasn\u2019t won me over up to now, so I was all the more curious which novel mare would reissue next. Until now I\u2019ve been able to trust them blindly. Whether that also applies to this book\u2014you\u2019ll find out in this review.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

On content alone, the book reads like a perfect fit for me. The Narcissus<\/em> lies in the harbour off Bombay in India and sets out for home, back to England, via the Cape of Good Hope. Also coming aboard is James Wait, a Black sailor. The voyage begins, and it quickly becomes clear that James Wait is ill. It doesn\u2019t take long before he draws the ship\u2019s crew to himself and throws the harmony on board thoroughly out of balance.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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The book opens with the crew first coming aboard, and Conrad evokes the scene atmospherically, with an eye for detail: the individual seamen, how the first hours on board pass, what the atmosphere is like, and how the voyage begins. It shows very quickly that Conrad knew exactly what he was talking about and must himself have been very familiar with seafaring. The moment when the Narcissus<\/em> sets sail is also wonderfully described. Just as I\u2019ve come to expect from the mare classics, this book carries a proper gust of the sea, and as a reader I immediately felt that sensation that overcomes me with every volume in the series. It\u2019s very similar to reading the novel Ned Myers; or, A Life Before the Mast<\/em>. That too is a truly fine novel about nineteenth-century seafaring, and this new book about the voyage of the Narcissus<\/em> is correspondingly dense in atmosphere, with an ever-present sea, with descriptions of nature, with scenes of light and weather that sprang vividly to life before my mind\u2019s eye.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I often found Conrad\u2019s style very poetic. He crafts some long, beautifully formed sentences\u2014especially when describing the sky, the sea, and the overall mood. I really enjoyed that. Here\u2019s an example of the kind of sentence that\u2019s sprinkled throughout:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The ship began to dip into a south-westerly swell, and the sleek, bright sky of the low latitudes took on, day by day above our heads, a harder sheen: quivering and pallid it arched over the ship like a colossal steel dome in which the deep voice of freshening storm-winds resounded. (p. 64)<\/p><\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Conrad also depicts the seamen wonderfully\u2014the different types you find aboard. The book conveys the soul of ordinary sailors who toiled day in, day out, braved every kind of weather, and did very hard work. Conrad erects a monument to them here, and I especially liked the old sailor Singleton. He characterises him beautifully, with all the virtues and weaknesses of a person who has spent his entire life at sea. And he does it with powerful language, in an abstracted way that gives these people a stage\u2014admirable despite their simple, rough-hewn manner.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

In truth they had been men who had known hard work, privation, violence, and degradation, but not fear, and had never felt in their hearts any malicious desire. Men difficult to lead but easy to inspire; men of few words, but man enough to hold in low esteem, deep in their hearts, the sentimental voices that lamented the hardness of their fate. [\u2026] They were the everlastingly young children of the mysterious sea. [\u2026] they were worn out, bowed, and patient like stone caryatids upholding through the night the lighted halls of a splendid and glorious edifice. They are no more\u2014and it does not matter. Sea and earth are not faithful to their children. A truth, a faith, a generation of men passes\u2014and is forgotten\u2014and it does not matter. (pp. 35\u201336)<\/p><\/blockquote>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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At times the novel feels like an adventure story, but it often loses a lot of pace and Conrad goes very deep into detail. He slowly unfolds, with comparisons, the thoughts and motives of the individual figures. I often found that a bit long-winded. As hinted above, he also writes wonderful sentences\u2014poetic, with a pleasant verbal melody. At the same time, his phrasing often feels unwieldy, and I never fully slipped into an easy reading flow. What Conrad writes has great depth, but it\u2019s not easily accessible and demands a certain level of attention to follow and fully grasp his trains of thought. The pleasure of beautiful sentences, then, comes at a price.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The overtly adventurous elements, by contrast, I found very successful\u2014they really gripped me. I didn\u2019t always find the characters\u2019 motives entirely consistent, though. Perhaps what\u2019s described in the book is possible; I consider it rather unlikely. The underlying causes for their actions are coherent and comprehensible, however. Perhaps it\u2019s on me\u2014or the temporal context. I never quite tuned into Conrad\u2019s mental world; I noticed that again and again while reading. Even so, I appreciated the high quality of the writing. I also sensed that much lies hidden in the story. The book has something dark, dystopian about it that reminded me a bit of Kafka, though Conrad doesn\u2019t conjure quite so bleak an atmosphere here.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

The true protagonists of the novel are the sea and the ship, the Narcissus<\/em>. And it\u2019s precisely this secret lead role the sea plays that explains why this book belongs in the mare classics series\u2014for it shares that trait with several other novels in the line, and it\u2019s what I love every time anew. Even if Conrad\u2019s message didn\u2019t fully reach me, these maritime impressions are exactly what made the read worthwhile for me. The sailors are quartered in the forecastle, a superstructure with a slight camber so the water runs off better. It looks like a back, which is why the quarters are called the \u201cforecastle\u201d or \u201cfo\u2019c\u2019sle.\u201d You learn such details in the book, and the afterword with explanations is very helpful for the nautical terminology. This love of detail lends the book great authenticity.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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I found the informative afterword by the translator Mirko Bonn\u00e9 very interesting. There we learn that Conrad himself spent more than twenty years at sea\u2014as ship\u2019s boy, steward, second officer, and later as captain. He travelled all the continents, was on the coasts of Africa, China, and South America; he was in the Caribbean; rounded the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn; passed through the Suez Canal; and served on a river steamer in the Congo. In short: Conrad was a dyed-in-the-wool seaman. In 1884 he actually shipped out on an English clipper called the Narcissus<\/em>, and that too was the vessel\u2019s final voyage before being broken up. Most of the characters are indeed modelled on members of the Narcissus<\/em>\u2019s crew (Singleton foremost), but Conrad made clear even then that, while the novel has ties to reality, it is conceived as purely fictional. The model for James Wait was not part of the Narcissus<\/em>\u2019s crew but belonged to another ship with which Conrad, as in the book, returned from Bombay to England. After more than twenty years on countless voyages, Conrad contracted tropical fever and had to give up his seafaring career.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Joseph Conrad\u2019s real name was J\u00f3zef Teodor Na\u0142\u0119cz Konrad Korzeniowski. He was born in 1857 in Poland, the son of landed gentry. The Nigger of the \u201cNarcissus\u201d<\/em> first appeared in 1897 and counts among Conrad\u2019s early works. A few years later came Heart of Darkness<\/em>, one of his best-known novellas. Once Conrad had gained recognition, his novel about the Narcissus<\/em> was widely read because it was short and marketed as an adventure story\u2014though in my view that label only applies to a limited extent.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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The first edition appeared in 1897 under the title The Children of the Sea<\/em>. Only many years later was Conrad able to enforce his intended title for the U.S. edition, The Nigger of the \u201cNarcissus\u201d<\/em>. I\u2019m not surprised that the publisher mare didn\u2019t dare to translate the original title accordingly, and in the text, with two exceptions, the word in question is consistently rendered differently (usually as \u201cBlack man\u201d). I asked myself whether that\u2019s good or bad. Racism in classics doesn\u2019t bother me because I do value receiving a text as unaltered as possible. I\u2019m not a racist, and in my view it\u2019s exceedingly unlikely that such reading would turn anyone into one. I also found the story itself has little to do with racism. A Black man in the fo\u2019c\u2019sle had no friends at that time, in the age of colonisation. James Wait does, however, and even if his behaviour gives him a special status among the crew, his skin colour is rarely the issue. Conrad argues that he wanted to reflect seamen\u2019s argot and deliver as authentic a text as possible. After all, the novel is set in the colonial era. In the first edition he couldn\u2019t, however, carry through the word \u201cnigger\u201d, since the publisher feared that the predominantly white readership wouldn\u2019t exactly care to read about Black people. Overtly discriminatory racism was not the publisher\u2019s problem then. Krege translated the novel in 1994 and used the word \u201cBimbo\u201d instead of \u201cnigger\u201d, which also doesn\u2019t really fit. Mirko Bonn\u00e9 argues that translation is always a trade-off, and that the word \u201cnigger\u201d gained intensified force through the Nazi era that doesn\u2019t correspond to the original text. I wondered how the reaction would have been had mare stuck with the original title. I do think their chosen solution is good: every place in the text where Bonn\u00e9 translates the term differently is marked in the notes. I can well imagine Conrad didn\u2019t have racist intentions here but was aiming at the rough sailors\u2019 speech, which, according to Bonn\u00e9, is at times truly hard to translate. In Germany in 2020\u2014with its primary export of moral paternalism and its excessive political correctness\u2014you obviously can\u2019t get away with \u201cnigger\u201d in a title; even Pippi Longstocking\u2019s \u201cNegerk\u00f6nig\u201d has become a problem.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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The edition has the series\u2019 usual high quality, and I greatly credit mare with not tweaking production and design in favour of profit maximisation. They always come with a very sturdy cloth binding, sewn signatures, and high-quality paper. I really liked the colour of the ribbon marker; it harmonises beautifully with the binding and endpapers. The typeface is top-notch as well. Overall there are prettier volumes in the series\u2014the cover image here looks a bit too modern for my taste\u2014but it\u2019s a book made for the ages, so solid and high-quality that it will likely last the next hundred years with ease. In the hand it\u2019s a pleasure again, and you can tell at a glance from the photos that it\u2019s simply top-tier.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Conclusion:<\/strong> Joseph Conrad\u2019s novel The Nigger of the \u201cNarcissus\u201d<\/em> is a book that captivated me with its breath of the sea, its atmospheric scenes of seafaring, and its poetic language. Conrad\u2019s style doesn\u2019t entirely reach me, and the novel\u2019s significance didn\u2019t land with the force I sensed hidden within it. Nevertheless, it\u2019s a beautiful book\u2014for its design, high quality, fine adventure elements, depth, and the ever-present sea. I love the mare classics, and once again you can buy with confidence here.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Book information:<\/strong> The N. of the \u201cNarcissus\u201d<\/em> \u2022 Joseph Conrad \u2022 mare Verlag \u2022 256 pages \u2022 ISBN 9783866486126<\/p>\r\n\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m not really a collector, and apart from books I don\u2019t hoard things. And even with books, I\u2019m not someone who needs to own everything from a series. One exception is the mare classics. These beautiful bibliophile volumes always come with outstanding production values and consistently convince with their content. They\u2019re always classics by major … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The N. from the “Narcissus” \u2022 Joseph Conrad”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":{"title":"Der Niemand von der \u00bbNarcissus\u00ab \u2022 Joseph Conrad - lesestunden","description":"Ich bin ja eigentlich kein Sammler und mit Ausnahme von B\u00fcchern horte ich nicht irgendwelche Dinge. Und auch bei B\u00fcchern bin ich eigentlich niemand, der unbedin"},"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"_slim_seo_primary_term_category":0,"_slim_seo_primary_term_post_tag":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[10,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8016","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classics","category-reviews"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/der_niemand_von_der_narcissus_1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8016","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8016"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8016\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8016"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8016"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lesestunden.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8016"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}