Typhoon

Rating:
Summary: Conrad the master!
Review: Joseph Conrad was a master of language. In a brief but classic book, you will experience the incredible power of a typhoon while on a steamer as if you were there. Especially real is the scene in the chart room after the initial damage. It is very dark, and Captain MacWhirr lights matches to see his surroundings. Conrad's concise descriptions make you feel even the flame of the match as it burns down. If only this book were longer! I would have loved to know more about Captain MacWhirr's adventures. I HIGHLY recommend this book, as well as Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

Rating:
Summary: A storm and how to survive it
Review: Taking maximum advantage from his long years at sea, and from his innate insight into the human soul, Conrad tells an outright and direct story about a huge typhoon in the midst of the Yellow Sea. But the book is not so much about the storm in itself, but about the human character and how it reacts to disaster.

Captain MacWhirr is famous for being an efficient, calm, dull and silent man, someone you would trust but not like. He seems to be rather unbrilliant, though, never understanding why people talk so much. The other characters are also interesting, especially Jukes, the "young Turk", vivid and dynamic; Solomon the head engineer, another wise man from the sea, and the disgusting and repugnant "second officer", the type of coward you don't want to be with in this kind of drama.

Human character, then, is revealed by limit-situations much more than at any other time, as war literature fans know, and this tale will leave you wondering how YOU would react if you had to make decisions in the midst of a horrible, and wonderfully depicted, typhoon.

Rating:
Summary: One part of Conrad's writing agenda
Review: Well, my review title isn't very interesting but I suppose what I am trying to get at is that this story is a sort of metaphysical pornography, and squeezes in a great part of the thoughts Conrad was interested in conveying. Curtcow wrote that the audio tape is prone toward placing one in "dreamland" and this is true, and probably not at all good for the conveyance of a violent story. However, the accents give something to the personalities that I am sure I would have missed had I read this first, especially given the fact that I am an american and the story is 100 years old, written in english, and more importantly,of course, there is the sailors'slang. My own internal linguistic set-up would have had Mac Whirr speaking as I might speak, and that wouldn't have been good. Following this, I guess all americans reading Conrad might want to listen to some of his tales. It is also nice to hear Conrad's smooth sentences, which for the most part remain incredibly unaffected, given his use of metaphor and analogy and simile and the possible fact that he is using metaphor, analogy, and simile all at once. (Either that or I simply can't tell when a particular image described is one of the three.)

I don't agree with the idea that Conrad wrote this with the idea that his readers might ponder how they would react. To me it is more like a Quentin Tarentino thing - entertainment before anything. After all, this story, when compared to the very difficult, time-consuming, and at times simply burdensome Nostromo, is quite simple. (Not in any way to deny the extreme fear the story inspires) I guess at times I would have liked to hear more arguing between the sailors, but, come to think of it, the confusion of the typhoon necessarily renders that impossible.

Still, the cover to cover classics edition was quite expensive, and unlike other audio tapes I have (Middlemarch or the Odyssey especially)I doubt one year down the road I will want to listen, as opposed to read, this novella.