(Photo credit: Alamy, The Economist).
The Economist (subscription) has a review of an upcoming biography of Joseph Conrad by Maya Jasanoff (The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. Penguin Press).
The magazine calls Conrad the “First Novelist of Globalization”, which I think is quite accurate. Conrad, born in Ukraine, ran away to sea-faring at 16, landed in the UK at 21. He wrote about regions unfamiliar at the birth of globalization – South East Asia (in Lord Jim) and Belgian Congo (Into the Heart of Darkness, which inspired Apocalypse Now) – lands that stretched in the unknowns (compared to British Raj in India). Think of all the people writing about what AI means to the world, now.
Conrad is a point of inspiration for trying to write on OWL Blog. As Economist points out, English was his third language, which he learned to speak only when he was 21. A few years back, during my visit to SE Asia, I read Lord Jim. I wrote about it on this blog. An excerpt below:
[Lord Jim] is an astonishing technical exercise, well ahead of its time. In Lord Jim, Conrad tries out an arsenal of writing and story-telling techniques — a story within a story, an unreliable narrator, a non-linear time structure including flash forwards, and switches in points-of-view. Conrad also wrote the book in English (his third language) which he had learned to speak in his twenties!
Conrad is difficult to read. Certainly, there are criticisms (see Chinua Achebe) about colonial perspectives associated with the Heart of Darkness. Nevertheless, I think Conrad should be read: his writing is multi-layered, inaccessible, and faulty, which makes him very human.
My full review here.