Audiobook · read by volunteers
Lord Jim
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924)
Read by Stewart Wills · 30 chapters · 14 h 25
About the book
A young sailor, Jim, dreams of heroism, and in one dark moment at sea he fails the test he had imagined for himself. What follows is a lifetime of trying to outrun the memory. He drifts from port to port in the East, taking humble jobs and moving on whenever his past catches up with him, until a remote island offers him the chance of a new beginning and a place among its people.
Joseph Conrad’s novel is a classic of early modernism, told through the voice of the seaman Marlow, who turns the story over and over, looking for the truth about a man he cannot quite understand. It is a book about honour, shame and the weight of an ideal. In thirty sections and a little over fourteen hours, this recording offers a rich and demanding story of conscience and adventure.
Introduction
Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) was born in the Polish territories of the Russian empire and became a British subject and one of the major novelists in English. For years he served in the merchant navy, and the sea and its ports fill his writing. Lord Jim was published in 1900 and is generally counted among his most important novels, a classic of early literary modernism.
The story tells of a young man of simple and sensitive character, who loses his honour in a display of cowardice at sea and then spends the rest of the book trying to atone for it, measuring himself against an ideal of conduct he has set himself. The final part is set on the remote island of Patusan. Conrad tells the story in an unusual way. Much of it is narrated by the sailor Marlow, who also appears in Heart of Darkness, and the narrative moves back and forth in time, as if the truth could only be approached from several angles. Readers sometimes find this slow at first, but it gives the novel its distinctive power.
The questions it asks are lasting ones. What do we owe to our own idea of ourselves? Can a person redeem a single failure? Is it possible to know another human being?
The recording is divided into 30 sections and lasts about fourteen and a half hours. It is read by a single LibriVox volunteer. Why listen now? Because the book is both an adventure and a deep study of conscience, and because hearing Marlow’s voice, patient, uncertain and humane, is the best way to feel the force of this long, probing tale.
Public domain
Joseph Conrad died in 1924: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text