Synopses & Reviews
Published to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth,
The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad is a brilliant and highly readable biography of a literary figure of world-wide reputation.
Conrads impact has been so profound and far-reaching that, eighty years after his death, he remains an essential cultural reference point. Such phrases as “heart of darkness” and “The horror! The horror!” have entered the language, often cited without an awareness of their original contexts. His popular legacy extends to Latin American fiction, to the spy novel, to the terrorist and anarchist character, and to film. The writers he has influenced range from T. S. Eliot to William Faulkner to V. S. Naipaul and John Le Carré. For a writer of “difficult” fiction he has enjoyed a remarkably wide impact, yet as Marlow proclaims in Lord Jim of the figure whose story he tells,“he was one of us,” and so Conrad remains in fascinating ways.
Stapes biography – an intimate portrait, including previously unpublished photographs – offers a Conrad for our times, a man with a deep sense of otherness, of multiple cultural identities and, writing in his third language, a working writer, whose novels and stories are a cornerstone of literary modernism and, indeed, of modernity itself.
Review
"John Stape has brought Joseph Conrad so much to life a working writer, a man subject to pain and vicissitude, not a 'study,' not a statue that inevitably one suffers with him. Jessie Conrad, too, is alive in these pages, and their son Borys so much so that Stape can't help wanting to give him a good thrashing. Especially striking in the scope of this superb biography is its organic human trajectory, the evolution of Conrad from where he began to what he became. The undistinguished young Conrad could really be anyone at all; the old Conrad is Conrad, and not because the image is so familiar those omniscient creases fanning out of all-seeing eyes that have known dread. One finishes reading in something like a state of personal mourning: a life that is as sad as it is triumphant." Cynthia Ozick, author of Heir to the Glimmering
Synopsis
The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad is the first new biography in more than a decade of one of modern literature's most important writers whose work remains widely read and acutely relevant eighty years after his death. In this authoritative, insightful book, we see Joseph Conrad as a man who consistently reinvented himself. Born in 1857 in Berdichev, Ukraine, he left home early and worked as a sailor out of Marseilles; traveled to the Far East and Africa with the British merchant navy; and, finally, in 1891, settled in England, beginning a precarious existence as an novelist and family man. Here is a Conrad for our moment: a man with a deep sense of otherness; a writer with multiple cultural identities who wrote in his third language and whose fiction became the cornerstone of literary Modernism.
With his exceptional knowledge and understanding of Conrad, and drawing on unpublished letters and documents, John Stape succeeds in casting an illuminating new light on the life of a willfully enigmatic man who remains one of the greatest writers of his, and our, time.
About the Author
John Stape is Research Fellow at St. Mary's University College, London. He has taught in universities in Canada, France, and the Far East. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, and co-editor of two volumes of The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. He divides his time between Vancouver and London.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
List of illustrations
List of maps
A note about place-names
A note about money
Chapter 1: ‘Pole-Catholic and Gentleman (18571878)
Chapter 2: ‘Tell me the Sea: Apprentice, Mate, and
Master (18781890)
Chapter 3: Crisis: Finding a Home (18901895)
Chapter 4: Husband and Writer (18961898)
Chapter 5: ‘The Fatal Partnership: Collaborator
and Friend (18991904)
Chapter 6: The Analyst of Illusions (19051909)
Chapter 7: Breakdown and Recovery (19101914)
Chapter 8: The Englishman (19151919)
Chapter 9: ‘Smiling Public Man (19201924)
After
Appendices
Maps
Family trees: The Korzeniowski/Conrad, Bobrowski, Nash Sex, and George families
Conrads circle: A select Whos Who
A guide to pronunciation
Notes
Select bibliography: Conrad
Bibliography
Index