Retrieve The Rescue Edited By Joseph Conrad Contained In Version

"Am I a fat white man" snapped the serang, "I was a man of the sea before you were born, O Sali! The order is to keep silence and mind the rudder, lest evil befall the ship.
" '

Enjoyed this read, Conrad knows how to describe a sea calm better than anyone else, I had a hard time with this one, my second book on estuary hijinks before the First World War sitelinkThe Riddle of the Sands, Some of it had some of the best writing by Conrad I've run across and some it I was in the same doldrums Lingard's boat starts the novel in.


In the introduction Conrad relates that he started "The Rescue" before all of his masterpieces sitelinkThe Nigger of the Narcissus, sitelinkHeart of Darkness, and sitelinkLord Jim and it was sitting there in an unfinished state while he wrote those books that are very related to the present one.
However, those books were written with a hand of fire, while this one was written with a hand of smoke,

A brig captain, Lindgard, is hailed out of his ship's, and his, doldrums by a mysterious rowboat of sailors, This sets the tone for the rest of the book his not knowing what is the ultimate aim of the people he brings on board and how much he should trust them.
A yacht has been stranded in the shallows of a coast that Lindgard knows very well and he knows that if that yacht stays there, everything he cares for is doomed.


This book would make an excellent seanoir film I'm surprised that somebody hasn't made it yet! All the tropes of noir are there femme fatale, honorable yet conflicted "Man of Fate", shifting allegiances, mysterious and/or inscrutable happenings, and a gloom of static dread that pervades everything.
However, Conrad lays on the inscrutable doom too thick I got the point, I just want to know what is happening sometimes! I never really got why the native chiefs of the island were so interested in the hostages and why the hostages kept going back and forth like passenger pigeons.


The book might also suffer from a little too obvious allegory to the First World War the character Mr, Travers is an obvious allusion to the dolts who started the trench warfare and then washed their hands of it, And the situations of the hostages setting off a war seemed like the assassination of a minor prince a happenstance that really doesn't mean much, but because it took place in a powderkeg, the whole thing blew up.
Excellent, but not quite the sublime Conrad, "The Rescue" ends the socalled Lingard trilogy, and oddly it is the novel that has more Lingard than any other, But I still can't place him, Essentially, he falls in love with Mrs, Travers. And here you realize love, and more especially soul mates of the opposite sex meeting, is a subject foreign to most Conrad, There is some in "Victory," Nostromo loves in "Nostromo," but the relationship itself is never the thing Conrad describes most deeply, As in so much Conrad, and as in "Almayer's Folly" and "An Outcast of the Island," that precede "The Rescue," it is much more man and his relationship with the world, as opposed to each other, that draws his most attention.
Again, we have wonderful, evocative passages describing the jungle and these places off the chart specks, really in the Malay archipelago, but unlike the first two of the trilogy we are no longer in Borneo.
And, as noted, we finally have Captain Lingard himself as a main character, as opposed to this overarching presence as the figure that has set everything in motion.
I think part of my problem was confusion among characters, There are a lot of them, I suspect that, like "Nostromo," repeated readings would make all clear, But, short version, there are several native chiefs who weave in and out of "The Rescue" and, improbably, they all seem to be spread along a beach in the lagoon where most of the action takes place.
Despite the big cast, lots of the characters are memorable: Jaffir, the great messenger Jorgensen, the white man lost to the jungle and the world D'Alcacer, a socialite that would normally be a cipher in Conrad, or a subject of his scorn, who is nevertheless sympathetically drawn and a most appealing man and of course Tom Lingard.
Lingard has a fixation like Charles Gould in "Nostromo," although it is never explicitly spelled out just what his prize or objective is at least not to me.
Lingard does bring Mrs. Travers in on the secret his 'Guffin,' if you will and it attracts her even more, but to this reader anyway exactly what Lingard hopes to accomplish is never clear.
That is all goes to hell, on the other hand, is, As always, Conrad paints incredible settings for his characters that, like Faulkner, go through layers and layers of thought and remembrance without, in real time, doing much or going far.
The whole novel takes place in something less than a square mile, I'd say, and one of the best things about "The Rescue" is how Conrad can make a world in this postage stamp on the south

seas.
"The Rescue" strikes me as something like Hamsun's "Rosa," which I also read recently, Both are outstanding books, but both are written by some of the greatest writers of all time and I feel like both are more for big fans of Conrad or Hamsun and not the ones to recommend to readers new to either author or not looking to make a deep dive in either.
Not the best of Conrad, slow, verbose, heavy, over egged, Foggy plot, and the main character seems two dimentional, But i love Conrad and can forgive him this one! I finished it I'm rescued, I can't include certain thoughts on the book without risking being thrown off Goodreads, Let's say that I couldn't put it down it was an obsession captured as I was by the soaring prose that bordered on pure poetry, Conrad does that for me, For example, at the sight of his obsession on deck, Captain Linguard, observed,

, . . "Mrs. Travers rose nervously and going aft began to gaze at the coast, Behind her the sun, sunk already, seemed to force through the mass of waters the glow of an unextinguishable fire, and below her feet, on each side of the yacht, the lustrous sea, as if reflecting the colour of her eyes, was tinged a sombre violet hue.
" p.

Who can resist For a minute, I thought I was still reading Faust, a book I can't finish but keep reading captivated by the poetry without following the story.


It is an acquired taste, The Rescue is an advanced placement novel i, e. , I wouldn't
dive into Conrad if you pardon the expression with this book you could drown in the words, Start with the Heart of Darkness or Nostromo, .