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    Typhoon
    Typhoon
    Typhoon
    Ebook122 pages2 hours

    Typhoon

    By Joseph Conrad

    3.5/5

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    Joseph Conrad’s classic oceanic adventure pits the will of man against the sheer destructive force of nature

    The decks of the Nan-Shan boast young and imaginative first mate Jukes and no-nonsense captain MacWhirr. But when the ocean turns violent and the skies darken ominously, will the captain’s skepticism and the crew’s foolhardiness be the Nan-Shan’s undoing?
     
    Based on Conrad’s experiences as a sailor aboard a turn-of-the-century freighter, this thrilling adventure has at its center the titular typhoon—a force threatening untold death and destruction, and humbling even the greatest of men.
     
    This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateMay 26, 2015
    ISBN9781504013727
    Author

    Joseph Conrad

    Joseph Conrad (1857 1924) was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. He was granted British nationality in 1886, but always considered himself a Pole. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a marked accent). He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent universe. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature.Early lifeJoseph Conrad was born on 3 December 1857 in Berdichev, in Podolia, a part of modern Ukraine that had belonged to the Kingdom of Poland before the 1793 Second Partition of Poland. He was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski and his wife Ewa Bobrowska. The father was a writer, translator, political activist and would-be revolutionary. Conrad, who would actually be known to his family as "Konrad" rather than "Józef", was christened Józef Teodor Konrad after his maternal grandfather Józef, his paternal grandfather Teodor, and the heroes (both named "Konrad") of two poems by Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady and Konrad Wallenrod.Though the vast majority of the area's inhabitants were Ukrainians, the land was almost completely owned by the Polish szlachta (nobility) that Conrad's parents belonged to. Polish literature, particularly patriotic literature, was held in high esteem by the area's Polish population.Because of the father's attempts at farming and his political activism, the family moved repeatedly. In May 1861 they moved to Warsaw, where Apollo joined the resistance against the Russian Empire. This led to his imprisonment in Pavilion X (Ten) of the Warsaw Citadel. Conrad would write: " In the courtyard of this Citadel characteristically for our nation my childhood memories begin." On 9 May 1862 Apollo and his family were exiled to Vologda, 500 kilometres north of Moscow and known for its bad climate. In January 1863 Apollo's sentence was commuted, and the family was sent to Chernihiv in northeast Ukraine, where conditions were much better. However, on 18 April 1865 Ewa died of tuberculosis.

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    3.5/5

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    • 5/5
      O my GOD!!
    • 3/5
      It was a real struggle to get through this book. It can be partly because of the language used but mainly happened because I didn`t care what was happening with the character. No even a little bit.
    • 4/5
      In my opinion, his best work.

    • 4/5
      This grips and engrosses, and evokes the fearsome moments anyone who's been in heavy water in heavy weather knows too well without being pedantic about it (no one drowns--just about that helplessness with drowning somewhere at the back of the mind). It does it well, and so you dwell on the weather and water and not on the weird stuff about what makes a bold sailor bold and what turns a Chinaman into a beast.
    • 4/5
      I used this novella to try out the Serial Reader app on my iPod. I think that having the story broken up into the small chunks interfered a little with my enjoyment but perhaps this Conrad just isn't up to the level of his longer novels.
    • 5/5
      One of the greatest examples in literature of landscape and nature treated as character. Although on one level this classic sea story is about the uneasy relations between the phlegmatic captain and his high-strung first mate, the antagonist, and in many ways the main character, is the storm itself:

      This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one's kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were--without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.

      This is my favorite of Conrad's novels, simply because the writing is so strong, evoking all the senses--you can feel it, hear, smell and taste the wind and water, and of course visualize it in all its shadowy hues, while the currents of man versus man, and men versus the elements, rage around each other like the storm itself. At the end, I felt like I had to rinse the salt water from my body.

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    Typhoon - Joseph Conrad

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    Typhoon

    Joseph Conrad

    Far as the mariner on highest mast

    Can see all around upon the calmed vast,

    So wide was Neptune’s hall … — KEATS

    Author’s Note

    THE MAIN CHARACTERISTIC OF this volume consists in this, that all the stories composing it belong not only to the same period but have been written one after another in the order in which they appear in the book.

    The period is that which follows on my connection with Blackwood’s Magazine. I had just finished writing The End of the Tether and was casting about for some subject which could be developed in a shorter form than the tales in the volume of Youth when the instance of a steamship full of returning coolies from Singapore to some port in northern China occurred to my recollection. Years before I had heard it being talked about in the East as a recent occurrence. It was for us merely one subject of conversation amongst many others of the kind. Men earning their bread in any very specialized occupation will talk shop, not only because it is the most vital interest of their lives but also because they have not much knowledge of other subjects. They have never had the time to get acquainted with them. Life, for most of us, is not so much a hard as an exacting taskmaster.

    I never met anybody personally concerned in this affair, the interest of which for us was, of course, not the bad weather but the extraordinary complication brought into the ship’s life at a moment of exceptional stress by the human element below her deck. Neither was the story itself ever enlarged upon in my hearing. In that company each of us could imagine easily what the whole thing was like. The financial difficulty of it, presenting also a human problem, was solved by a mind much too simple to be perplexed by anything in the world except men’s idle talk for which it was not adapted.

    From the first the mere anecdote, the mere statement I might say, that such a thing had happened on the high seas, appeared to me a sufficient subject for meditation. Yet it was but a bit of a sea yarn after all. I felt that to bring out its deeper significance which was quite apparent to me, something other, something more was required; a leading motive that would harmonize all these violent noises, and a point of view that would put all that elemental fury into its proper place.

    What was needed of course was Captain MacWhirr. Directly I perceived him I could see that he was the man for the situation. I don’t mean to say that I ever saw Captain MacWhirr in the flesh, or had ever come in contact with his literal mind and his dauntless temperament. MacWhirr is not an acquaintance of a few hours, or a few weeks, or a few months. He is the product of twenty years of life. My own life. Conscious invention had little to do with him. If it is true that Captain MacWhirr never walked and breathed on this earth (which I find for my part extremely difficult to believe) I can also assure my readers that he is perfectly authentic. I may venture to assert the same of every aspect of the story, while I confess that the particular typhoon of the tale was not a typhoon of my actual experience.

    At its first appearance Typhoon, the story, was classed by some critics as a deliberately intended storm-piece. Others picked out MacWhirr, in whom they perceived a definite symbolic intention. Neither was exclusively my intention. Both the typhoon and Captain MacWhirr presented themselves to me as the necessities of the deep conviction with which I approached the subject of the story. It was their opportunity. It was also my opportunity; and it would be vain to discourse about what I made of it in a handful of pages, since the pages themselves are here, between the covers of this volume, to speak for themselves.

    This is a belated reflection. If it had occurred to me before it would have perhaps done away with the existence of this Author’s Note; for, indeed, the same remark applies to every story in this volume. None of them are stories of experience in the absolute sense of the word. Experience in them is but the canvas of the attempted picture. Each of them has its more than one intention. With each the question is what the writer has done with his opportunity; and each answers the question for itself in words which, if I may say so without undue solemnity, were written with a conscientious regard for the truth of my own sensations. And each of those stories, to mean something, must justify itself in its own way to the conscience of each successive reader.

    Falk—the second story in the volume—offended the delicacy of one critic at least by certain peculiarities of its subject. But what is the subject of Falk? I personally do not feel so very certain about it. He who reads must find out for himself. My intention in writing Falk was not to shock anybody. As in most of my writings I insist not on the events but on their effect upon the persons in the tale. But in everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader’s attention, by securing his interest and enlisting his sympathies for the matter in hand, whatever it may be, within the limits of the visible world and within the boundaries of human emotions.

    I may safely say that Falk is absolutely true to my experience of certain straightforward characters combining a perfectly natural ruthlessness with a certain amount of moral delicacy. Falk obeys the law of self-preservation without the slightest misgivings as to his right, but at a crucial turn of that ruthlessly preserved life he will not condescend to dodge the truth. As he is presented as sensitive enough to be affected permanently by a certain unusual experience, that experience had to be set by me before the reader vividly; but it is not the subject of the tale. If we go by mere facts then the subject is Falk’s attempt to get married; in which the narrator of the tale finds himself unexpectedly involved both on its ruthless and its delicate side.

    Falk shares with one other of my stories (The Return in the Tales of Unrest volume) the distinction of never having been serialized. I think the copy was shown to the editor of some magazine who rejected it indignantly on the sole ground that the girl never says anything. This is perfectly true. From first to last Hermann’s niece utters no word in the tale—and it is not because she is dumb, but for the simple reason that whenever she happens to come under the observation of the narrator she has either no occasion or is too profoundly moved to speak. The editor, who obviously had read the story, might have perceived that for himself. Apparently he did not, and I refrained from pointing out the impossibility to him because, since he did not venture to say that the girl did not live, I felt no concern at his indignation.

    All the other stories were serialized. The Typhoon appeared in the early numbers of the Pall Mall Magazine, then under the direction of the late Mr. Halkett. It was on that occasion, too, that I saw for the first time my conceptions rendered by an artist in another medium. Mr. Maurice Grieffenhagen knew how to combine in his illustrations the effect of his own most distinguished personal vision with an absolute fidelity to the inspiration of the writer. Amy Foster was published in The Illustrated London News with a fine drawing of Amy on her day out giving tea to the children at her home, in a hat with a big feather. To-morrow appeared first in the Pall Mall Magazine. Of that story I will only say that it struck many people by its adaptability to the stage and that I was induced to dramatize it under the title of One Day More; up to the present my only effort in that direction. I may also add that each of the four stories on their appearance in book form was picked out on various grounds as the best of the lot by different critics, who reviewed the volume with a warmth of appreciation and understanding, a sympathetic insight and a friendliness of expression for which I cannot be sufficiently grateful.

    1919. J. C.

    I

    CAPTAIN MACWHIRR, OF THE steamer Nan-Shan, had a physiognomy that,

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