The Mirror of the Sea by Joseph Conrad
When Joseph Conrad was discharged from the clipper Torrens in London during the summer of 1893, his seafaring career was over. He had travelled the world by then, risen in rank from apprentice to captain, survived shipwreck and turbulent seas. But after nineteen years afloat he longed for the land, and wrote to his cousin of the 'uniform grey of my existence'. Once ashore, however, vivid memories of his past life began to surface. While steam and internal combustion were changing maritime travel forever, Conrad started to reflect on the voyages he had made in the Golden Age of Sail, the people and ships he had known, the extraordinary communities whose lives, language and very nature were shaped by the swells and silences of the open ocean. The Mirror of the Sea is a personal meditation on the sea and its meanings by one of the twentieth century's most important novelists. Our new edition is illustrated with the seascapes and deck scenes of the artist-sailor John Everett, who Conrad wanted to work with on an illustrated edition of The Mirror and the Sea in the 1920s.' The great thing,' Conrad wrote in 1923, 'is to make the book like art-production - atmospheric - not a shop article.' Nothing came of the project with John Everett at the time; Little Toller has resurrected this lost notion of a collaboration between the writer and the artist.
Joseph Conrad, christened Josef Teodor Konrad, Nalecz Korzeniowski, was born on December 3, 1857, in a part of Russia that had once belonged to Poland. His parents were members of the landed gentry, but as ardent Polish patriots, the suffered considerably for their political views. Orphaned at eleven, Conrad attended school for a few years in Cracow, He soon concluded, however, that there was no future for a Pole in occupied Poland, and at sixteen he left his ancestral home forever. The sea was Conrad's love and career for the next twenty years. In the French merchant marine, he sailed to the West. Indies, smuggled guns to Spanish rebels, ran into debt, and bungled a suicide attempt Then in the British merchant navy, he rose to first mate and finally to captain, sailing to Australia and Borneo and surviving at least one shipwreck. In 1890 he contracted to become captain of a Congo River steamer, but the six months he spent in Africa led only to disillusionment and ill health; this episode would become the basis for Conrad's masterpiece, Heart of Darkness. Reluctantly leaving the merchant service, he settled in England and completed his first novel, Almayer's Folly, already begun at sea. Hi subsequent works, many of which drew upon his sea experiences, include The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Lord Jim (1900), Heart of Darkness (1902), Youth (1902) Typhoon (1903), Nastromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), The Secret Sharer (1910), Under the Western Eyes (1911), and Chance (1913). The man who was twenty-one years old before he spoke a word of English is now regarded as one of the superb English stylists of all time. Conrad died almost literally on his desk in 1924, at the age of sixty-six.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781908213181 |
| ISBN 10 | 1908213183 |
| Title | The Mirror of the Sea |
| Author | Joseph Conrad |
| Series | Nature Classics Library |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Little Toller Books |
| Year published | 2013-10-21 |
| Number of pages | 200 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |