Photograph: John Daniel Bilsborough
Over the years, I’ve listened to many fine audiobooks on Librivox. Latterly, I’ve begun adding some recordings of my own to the Librivox catalog, and in the process, I’ve discovered that reading a work aloud is a great way to enrich my own appreciation of that work.
Below is a list of my own Librivox readings (starting with the most recent), together with some notes about each one. Librivox does not host contemporary fiction, but if you like my readings, you might be interested to hear me reading my own 1961, described by Kirkus Reviews as “a darkly humorous coming-of-age novel”.
Conrad described the twenty-six essays collected in “Notes on Life and Letters” as a “one-man show” comprising “Conrad literary, Conrad political, Conrad reminiscent, Conrad controversial”, but never Conrad “with his boots off”.
Not surprisingly, his essays on other authors provide key insights into his own ideas on the nature and goals of fiction writing, when treated as an art.
Conrad is particularly passionate here when writing on Russian autocracy, on Poland’s undervalued past and its hopes for the future, and on the self-serving blather of promoters loudly proclaiming that the sinking of the Titanic held no lessons for anyone but that the vessel should have had fewer lifeboats, and that her captain should have aimed to strike any iceberg head on. There are quieter, more tender recollections here too, including Conrad’s appreciation of Stephen Crane, whom Conrad knew personally and liked very much, and a moving account of his return to Poland after a long absence at the very moment the Great War was breaking out.
Duration: 8 hr 13 min. On Librivox
In this engaging and well-crafted novella, an older man recalls how a combination of obscure personal impulses and diabolical co-incidences marked his own difficult passage as a young ship’s officer across that invisible “shadow line” that separates the last days of carefree youth from the taking up of full adult responsibilities.
Duration: 3 hr 51 min. On Librivox
What a strange, dark tale is “Victory”, with its none-too-subtle allegorical tinge, and its queerly fetishistic villains, stepped straight out of a melodrama, seemingly. In the middle of it all, the hopelessly misunderstood European Axel Heyst, fled east to free himself from all associations with his nihilistic and embittered father, then linking his future to a much younger working class girl he hardly knows. Distrinct shades, surely, of Conrad’s own autobiography here. When the world comes knocking at the would-be isolate’s door, is there to be no escape?
Duration: 11 hr 56 min. On Librivox
A self-important English philosopher and his haughty, beautiful daughter sail to the South Pacific in hope of locating the daughter’s wrongly accused fiancée and rehabilitating his reputation. An evasive silk planter who may have met the man in question has other plans, however, for the beautiful, if dangerously vapid, daughter. A patent medicine salesman goes into partnership with an honest but financially troubled ship owner. What could go possibly wrong? During the Napoleonic era, a young British naval officer has a terrifying encounter involving a bed in Spain in which an Archbishop has once slept. The kind-hearted captain of a small steamer in the Far East undertakes a voyage to collect silver dollars being withdrawn from circulation from various trading stations, but runs up against three vicious rogues, one without hands, who have their own ideas about where those dollars belong. Even the greatest authors have to pay their bills — and these four stories, originally published in magazines, would appear to show Conrad writing very much in a bill-paying frame of mind.
Duration: 6 hr 4 min. On Librivox
“You are the expert in the psychological wilderness,” the nominal narrator of this engaging tale says at one point to Marlow, who in practice serves as this novel’s chief discoverer of hidden events, and commentator on the vagaries of human behaviour. In “Chance”, these are notable chiefly in the actions of various parties — some well-meaning, some blinded by their own lofty idealism, and others frankly exploitative — who in various ways meddle in the fate of Flora de Barral, an innocent young woman who just happens to be the only child of a fascinatingly bland and self-deluded fraudster who proves to be a very nasty piece of work indeed. Marlow’s ruminations on the actions of the various players whose paths cross Flora’s are always dry, and often very droll. ‘Chance’ was Conrad’s first truly popular novel, and even today it’s not hard to see why. This is Conrad at his most accessible.
Duration: 13 hr 31 min. On Librivox
This is the third, and in many ways culminating, part of Ford Madox Ford’s ‘Parade’s End’ tetralogy of novels, which begins with ‘Some Do Not’, followed by ‘No More Parades’, and whose coda would be ‘Last Post’.
While ‘A Man Could Stand Up’ can be appreciated on its own, it will make far better sense to a listener or reader already familiar with its predecessors. It’s at once a war story (the middle section is set in the trenches in France, in 1918), a story of immense upheaval in social mores, and a passionate, if extraordinarily restrained, love story. Just like, say, Virginia Woofe’s ‘Mrs Dalloway’, published the previous year, Ford’s novel is pitched at readers who are assumed to be highly literate and well-educated.
Duration: 6 hr 58 min. On Librivox
While the central figures in each of the three stories in this collection are sailing captains, the main action in two of them takes place on land, albeit in sight of the sea. In “A Smile of Fortune”, a naive young sea captain falls into grave moral peril when he locks horns with a wily ship chandler in Mauritius. In “The Secret Sharer”, a newly appointed sea captain is confronted with an altogether different kind of challenge when he attempts to haul in a rope ladder over his ship’s side one evening and finds it much heavier than usual. In “Freya of the Seven Isles”, Jasper Allen, the captain of a lovely little brig, floats on a cloud of love, expecting soon to marry Freya, the daughter of an East Indies plantation owner, and not taking seriously the pretentions of an older Dutch naval officer who sees himself as Jasper’s rival. The depth of psychological insight in these stories is variable, but each is a gripping and suspenseful example of Conrad’s magazine fiction in the years immediately preceding the Great War.
Duration: 6 hr 57 min. On Librivox
“But it is a vain enterprise for sophisticated Europe to try and understand these doings.”
Set in St Petersburg and Geneva, this austere and claustrophobic psycho-political tragedy focusses on the terrible plight of Razumov, a bright young student without family ties whose chance to live his own life is snatched from him the moment a fellow student takes refuge in his room after helping assassinate a Russian statesman. Razumov’s profound sense of grief and bitterness at the cruel logic of his predicament may well reflect Conrad’s own reaction to having his childhood and early teen years stolen from him, cruelly subsumed by the disastrous consequences of his Polish parents’ resistance to Russian brutality and domination.
Duration: 11 hr 16 min. On Librivox
Each of the stories in this collection is spun from a simple, if typically wry and bleak, idea. In “Gaspar Ruiz”, a South American general who has fought in a war of independence tells his guests a long tale about a notorious strong man that explains the origin of his current domestic arrangements. “The Informer” leads the reader into the depths of a political conspiracy, dealing very slyly indeed with questions of truth and pretence. In “The Brute”, we are asked whether we can believe there could be such a thing as a positively malevolent ship, while “An Anarchist” introduces us to an unfortunate man who has had a vision of society itself as malevolent and has not been able to rest in peace ever since. “The Duel”, the most obviously likeable tale in this collection, recounts the history of an unfortunate feud between two officers of Napoleon’s army that caused them to fight a series of duels over many years. “Il Conde” rounds out the collection, giving a new twist to the saying “See Naples and die”.
Duration: 8 hr 22 min. On Librivox
“Here speaks the man of masts and sails, to whom the sea is not a navigable element, but an intimate companion. The length of passages, the growing sense of solitude, the close dependence upon the very forces that, friendly to-day, without changing their nature, by the mere putting forth of their might, become dangerous to-morrow, make for that sense of fellowship which modern seamen, good men as they are, cannot hope to know.”
In this volume of essays, more than in any other single work, we get to see clearly just what Joseph Conrad’s years working on sail-powered ships meant to him — and they certainly meant a great deal to him, for all Conrad’s subsequent fretting that he might be typed as “only” a writer of the sea. This collection is particularly renowned for the lengthy episode titled “The Tremolino”, where Conrad gives us, in the character of the real-world Dominic, the model of his fictional Nostromo, as well as an account of personalities and gun-running activities he would later depict in “The Arrow of Gold”.
Duration: 6 hr 5 min. On Librivox
An impossibly imperturbable old sea captain, with two hundred Chinese labourers aboard his steamship, faces a terrifying typhoon for the first time in his life. When emigré Austrian peasant Yanko is washed up on an English beach, he encounters widespread hostility from the local people on account of his foreign ways, and only in time earns a meagre measure of grudging respect. Captain Falk — seemingly half man, half tug boat – desperately loves a shapely young woman, but standing in the way of any possible match is a most delicate question indeed. A young woman compelled to care for her blind father caringly refrains, over a period of years, from disillusioning crusty old Captain Hagberd, her landlord and immediate neighbour, when he maintains adamantly that his long-lost son, a sailor, will return imminently, and will naturally want to marry her. Conrad’s short fiction is often lighter than his novels. With the exception of Yanko’s tale (“Amy Foster”), these beautifully crafted, eminently readable stories tend to strike a sardonic, rather than a tragic, note.
Duration: 8 hr 11 min. On Librivox
This short tale was first published in book form alongside ‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘The End of the Tether’, the three tales representing youth, middle age and old age, respectively. One of Conrad’s ‘Marlow yarns’, the story is based on the trouble-plagued, much-delayed and ultimately ill-fated voyage of the cargo vessel ‘Palestine’ (here, ‘Judea’) carrying coal from England to Bangkok in 1882-1883, on which Conrad served his first posting as second mate. The story is notable (and somewhat unusual, for Conrad) in the light-hearted buoyancy of the narrator’s tone as he confronts difficulty after difficulty.
Duration: 1 hr 18 min. On Librivox
While it’s not often described as such, “Lord Jim” can be viewed as a kind of love story whose real theme is the close bond which develops between an older and worldly-wise sea captain, Marlow, and a deeply troubled young sailor called Jim who, in the opening phase of the story, commits an act of reprehensible cowardice for which he is publicly shamed. While the novel’s nominal focus rests squarely on Jim and his subsequent attempts to rebuild a sense of self-worth through his involvement in the life of a jungle community, we hear most of Jim’s tale from the mouth of Marlow, who watches Jim’s progress with the loving and respectful concern of a father overseeing the moral development of a wayward son. It’s worth noting that the story of the fictional SS Patna, retold here, is closely based on true events.
Duration: 12 hr 51 min. On Librivox
A brave Malay chieftain suffers from a surprising vulnerability. After giving birth to a series of unfortunate children, a farmer’s wife is determined to bear no more. A spoonful of sugar brings a neophyte ivory trader to a moment of Nietzschean self-realisation. A pompous ass discovers that his wife has run off with another man. Secluded in an eerie lagoon, a Malay carries a guilty secret in his heart. “Tales of Unrest” was the first volume of short fiction Joseph Conrad published in his own lifetime. While some of these tales evoke the settings of Conrad’s earliest novels, others clearly anticipate elements of Conrad’s subsequent masterworks “Heart of Darkness” and “The Secret Agent”.
Duration: 6 hr 35 min. On Librivox
Today, we’re likely to react to the title of this novella, on whose ‘sincerity of expression’ Conrad was willing to stake his artisitic reputation, with visceral disgust. There is a sad irony in this, for Conrad’s title originally alluded to a rather complex set of meanings, implying that, by virtue of our human nature, we all carry within the fragile vessel that is our idealised image of ourselves a darker being we find troubling, even despicable, but with whom we must eventually come to terms. Indeed, in the couse of this tale of a traumatic sea voyage from Bombay to London, Conrad suggests that in projecting their loathing of their own ambivalent feelings onto their (possibly dying) black shipmate James Wait, the crew of the Narcissus have considerable difficulty seeing the real James Wait behind their confused emotional reactions at all. The novella is remarkable for its knitting together of a stunningly well-realised physical drama involving an imperilled ship with a most discomforting psychodrama that draws in all twenty-six men who sail her.
Duration: 5 hr 48 min. On Librivox
| This, Conrad’s second, novel serves as an illuminating prequel of his first, ‘Almayer’s Folly’, teasing out the origins of the factional tensions that are such a distinctive feature of the social life of the little settlement of Sambir, on the Pantai river in Borneo, that figure so prominently in its predecessor. The central plot has an almost mythic quality (‘A foolish king has two sons who are deeply jealous of each other’), the role of the ‘king’ in this case being played by Captain Tom Lingard, a swashbuckling if somewhat simple-minded freebooter who for many years has meddled in political affairs in the Malacca Straits for reasons both opportunistic and altruistic, and who has occasionally taken on ‘lost causes’ as his own personal protégés out of mixture of vanity and genuine good-heartedness. Lingard has previously set up one such protégé, Kaspar Almayer, as his employee at an isolated trading station in Sambir. When he learns that another former protégé, Peter Willems, has disgraced himself in Macassar and is on the point of suicide, Lingard takes pity on him and whisks him away to stay with Almayer in Sambir. Almayer and Willems are mutually jealous and hostile, however, and Willems’ response to being ‘saved’ by Lingard is to bite the hand that has fed him in an act of betrayal that shocks Lingard and triggers a devastating dénouement. Among its other qualities, the novel is notable for its frank, even-handed depiction of interracial suspicion and enmity, and for its glorious descriptions of the physical environment of Sambir, where most of the story takes place.
Duration: 11 hr 4 min. On Librivox |
| Conrad began dictating the series of loose autobiographical sketches that would become ‘A Personal Record’ in 1911, when he was half way through writing ‘Under Western Eyes’. His avowed aim was to give his readers a sense of ‘the man behind the work’, and he certainly succeeded in creating a vivid impression of the kind of Joseph Conrad he would have liked to have been seen as: a man capable of wry humour and self-deprecation, but a sober, serious man too, prepared to face life as he found it. While some of the moments Conrad recalls seem slight enough in themselves – a general’s daughter barges into his room while he is writing the end of ‘Nostromo’; he supervises the unloading of a pony for the real Almayer up a river in Borneo – his manner of interweaving various episodes, abruptly dropping one and leaping to another epoch of his life, interspersing all with reflections on life and his own art – all this is Conrad at his most engaging.
Duration: 4 hr 38 min. On Librivox |
| Joseph Conrad was born in former Poland, spent part of his childhood exiled in Russia because of his father’s Polish nationalist political activities, learned and read French early, and did not speak a word of English until his late teens. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that when Conrad came to write this, his first novel, it centred on the pain of having a contested sense of identity, the experience of having to choose, in the midst of argument and derision, whether one was really ‘this or that’. The Almayer of the story is a morose and hapless trader of Dutch extraction, settled in shambolic poverty on a river in Borneo. He dreams of finding gold inland and taking his mixed-race daughter Nina triumphantly to the Netherlands, where neither of them has ever been. Nina and her strong-willed Filipina mother, however, prove to have quite different loyalties and a quite different plan — though this plan, in turn, soon appears to come unstuck.
Duration: 6 hr 43 min. On Librivox |
| Randall Jarrall once quipped that a novel is a prose narrative of some length that has something wrong with it. I wonder what Jarrall could possibly have found ‘wrong’ with Madame Bovary; for me this novel is about as close to perfect as any substantial work of fiction could be.
I was intrigued to re-read this novel after learning that Joseph Conrad (who spoke fluent French well before he spoke even stumbling English) held both Flaubert and de Maupassant in the highest regard. Conrad, of course, knew both authors in their original language. As I read Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s translation of Madame Bovary aloud, I found myself amazed once again at how taut, fresh and daring Flaubert’s narrative is, acutely perceptive and psychologically credible, filled with striking images that bring out the essence of a situation, yet also very, very funny at times. Some of the set-piece scenes are just superb: a seducer closes in on his prey as judges award prizes at a country fair; a pompous rationalist denounces his employee for possessing an illustrated guide to conjugal love as his children crowd around, wanting to see the pictures — and then, of course, there is that cab ride, surely the most famous cab ride in the history of literature. Translator Eleanor Marx-Aveling, who happened to be Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, would appear to have had a most interesting (but sadly brief) life and career in her own right, and is well worth reading about further, too. Duration: 12 hr 33 min. On Librivox |
How Conrad struggled to write this book! In the Author’s Note eventually published with the novel, Conrad said that having laid it aside (around 1897) in order to write The Nigger of the Narcissus, the reason he did not return immediately to The Rescue was not that he “had grown afraid of it”, but rather than he had decided it could wait while he completed some other projects he had in mind. The truth, though, seems to have been more complicated. Conrad’s biographer Karl Fredericks states Conrad was in some way or another working on The Rescue for 23 of the 29 years of his writing career.
I had not read this work before recording it for Librivox, and I have to admit I found it confusing and disappointing overall, though in any Conrad novel there are always going to be some marvellous passages. I feel such a sense of personal affinity with Conrad I’m prepared to read anything he wrote. If you’re in the same small club you’ll probably want to listen to The Rescue, too. I think it’s fair to say, however, that it’s not Conrad at his best.
Duration: 14 hr 8 min. On Librivox
F.R. Leavis famously quibbled “Is anything added to the impressive mysteriousness of the Congo by such sentences as It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention?” (F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, p 177) Novelist Chinua Achebe took a different line of attack, describing Conrad in an essay as “a thorough-going racist”, and asking “whether a novel… which celebrates this dehumanization (ie, of Africans), which depersonalizes a portion of the human race, can be called a great work of art”, before concluding “No, it cannot.” (Chinua Achebe, An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad ‘s Heart of Darkness).
If, as I hope you do, you one day read, or listen to, Heart of Darkness, you’re more than likely going to find yourself faced with exactly these questions yourself. I myself find this novella (it’s less that 40,000 words long) as mesmeric and sombre as a great requiem mass, even in the face of such criticisms as Leavis and Achebe have raised.
Duration: 4 hr 3 min. On Librivox
I’ve never quite forgiven the publishers of a Penguin volume in which this novella appeared for giving away a key plot point on the back cover of their book. I’m not about to commit the same error here! If you’re not already aware of what this story is ‘about’, you’ll find out soon enough, but I suggest you steer clear of spoilers in the meantime.
I love this tale for the way in which Conrad seems, for a rare moment, to have been able to shrug off the coat of bleak pessimism that was his habitual garb to tell a tale of great poignancy that does, nonetheless, feel broadly consistent with his generally grim philosophy of life.
I am rarely moved to actual tears reading Conrad, but I am when reading The End of the Tether. For me it doesn’t hurt, either, that the central character’s daughter has settled in Melbourne, Australia, which is my own home town.
Duration: 5 hr 16 min. On Librivox
The oddest things can nudge one to pick up a book. I was moved to dip into this remarkable work after coming across a passage in Ford Madox Ford’s remembrance of Joseph Conrad to the effect that Conrad physically wrote The End of the Tether “before the glass bookshelves that had seen Carlyle write ‘The French Revolution’”.
On looking into the text itself, I was immediately struck by Carlyle’s love of grand, rolling phrases that just cried out to be read aloud.
Her Majesty, who looks unusually sad tonight (his Majesty sitting dulled with the day’s hunting), is told that the sight of it would cheer her. Behold! She enters there, issuing from her State-rooms, like the Moon from the clouds, this fairest unhappy Queen of Hearts; royal Husband by her side, young Dauphin in her arms! She descends from the Boxes, amid splendour and acclaim; walks queen-like, round the Tables; gracefully escorted, gracefully nodding; her looks full of sorrow, yet of gratitude and daring, with the hope of France on her mother-bosom! And now, the band striking up, O Richard, O mon Roi, l’univers t’abandonne (O Richard, O my King, and world is all forsaking thee) — could man do other than rise to height of pity, of loyal valour? Could featherheaded young ensigns do other than, by white Bourbon Cockades, handed them from fair fingers; by waving of swords, drawn to pledge the Queen’s health; by trampling of National Cockades; by scaling the Boxes, whence intrusive murmurs may come; by vociferation, tripudiation, sound, fury and distraction, within doors and without — testify what tempest-tost state of vacuity they are in? Till champagne and tripudiation do their work; and all lie silent, horizontal; passively slumbering, with meed-of-battle dreams!
Tripudiation? Just one of many words in Carlyle’s rich vocabulary I had never encountered before. And then, of course, the plot’s not bad either!
In an audiobook, the listener doesn’t get the scholarly apparatus of citations and index to be found in the text version, but for the most part the story comes alive well once the listener gets attuned to Carlyle’s rather idiosyncratic way of narrating his tale.
They don’t write history like this any more, and it’s rather a pity. Particularly surprising to me were Carlyle’s generally sympathetic treatment of the Jacobins, and his refusal to be overawed by the horrors of the Terror.
Duration Vol 1 The Bastille: 11 hr 9 min. On Librivox
Duration Vol 2 The Constitution: 12 hr 6 min. On Librivox
Duration Vol 3 The Guillotine: 12 hr 44 min. On Librivox
Conrad biographer Maya Jasanoff admitted she “failed spectacularly to read Nostromo the first time.” As a far less well-educated reader than Dr Jasanoff, I can recall that when I first read Nostromo in my thirties, I balked at Conrad’s insistence on alluding darkly to ‘material interests’, and to much other seemingly irrelevant matter (as I thought), much preferring that he would get on with what I hoped would emerge as ‘the story’. It was only after returning to this novel decades later that I really began to appreciate its riches, and to understand that these are not riches of plot, per se.
If this is your own first encounter with Nostromo, I suggest you be gentle with yourself. Much of the beauty of the novel becomes apparent only when one can read the individual parts against an understanding of the overall design. You almost certainly won’t read this novel twice in a year, but I’d suggest it is well worth reading (or listening to) at least twice in a lifetime.
Duration: 18 hr 1 min. On Librivox
To me, it was a no-brainer that I would want to read this for Librivox once I had read Some Do Not…
Although Ford was ultimately to write four inter-related novels about the Tietjens and their associates set immediately before, during and after World War I, this was not his plan at the outset, and the four novels are not — to my eye, anyway — stylistically identical, although each deals powerfully with mental states of dissociation and hysteria, and thus to some extent invite comparison with the passages about Septimus and Rezia in Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs Dalloway, which, incidentally, was published in the same year (1925).
Many aspects of Ford’s picture of life in the British army in France may strike the modern listener as bizarre, but it’s worth recalling that Ford himself did live through military experiences very similar to those described here, so he presumably knew what he was writing about. Indeed, contemporary critics generally praised the way Ford had captured the crazy essence of the experience of many soldiers in this novel.
Duration: 8 hr 26 min. On Librivox
| I had never heard of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy, of which this novel turned out to be the first instalment, until Alan Maplestone, a member of the Librivox forum, alerted me to this work after noticing I had read The Good Soldier. And what a strange, wonderful and powerful work this turns out to be.
Not many years before he wrote this novel, Ford himself had served at the front line in France, had been blown up and had suffered so severely from shell shock that he had doubted he would ever write again. Reading the novel nearly a hundred years after it was written, I must admit I found myself struggling at times with a sense of disorientation, wondering if I was meant to be able to understand fully what was going on at first glance, or if I was actually meant to be ‘thrown’. As for the extraordinarily intense, acrimonious relationship between Christopher Tietjens and his wife Sylvia, is there anything like it in literature? This really is a great novel, I think, strikingly modernist, yet for all that with some superb, relatively conventional set pieces, including a breakfast in a country house where everyone is pretending to ignore the insanity of the host, and a wonderfully prolonged love scene played out between Christopher and a young suffragette as they plod along country roads behind a horse through the shortest night of the year — a scene that comes to assume greater and greater significance in the novels that make up the remainder of the quartet. Duration: 11 hr 50 min. On Librivox |
Despite this novel’s title and its date of publication (1915), it’s not really about soldiering at all.
In a sense, the narrative is one long game, as Ford challenges us to read between the lines and figure out what his narrator, John Dowell, either genuinely does not understand, or pretends not to understand, about the love intrigues that are going on right under his (apparently very obtuse) nose.
After Librivox published this audiobook, I was contacted by someone who had taken on the challenge of translating this work into Arabic, and who was hoping I might be able to tease out the meaning of some of the more difficult passages. As our correspondence developed, I began to appreciate better just how densely packed with (difficult-to-translate) meanings and allusions many of Ford’s paragraphs are, often with very witty, though dark, effect.
All up, the novel constitutes a ferociously funny (well, I think it’s funny) and bitter attack on the institution of the “British stiff upper lip”.
Duration: 7 hr 35 min. On Librivox
I had never previously read this late work of Conrad’s, but was moved to record it when I noticed it was not in the Librivox catalogue.
According to one Conrad biographer, E.M. Forster’s mother felt the work should have been titled The Arrow of Lead (The Dawn Watch, Maya Jasanoff, p. 305). A reviewer in Nation remarked that “Ortega and the sinister pietist, Teresa Rita’s sister… are both horribly well done and stand out in an incisive terror” but concluded that these are “a tenuous compensation for a book in which genius itself seems to become insubstantial” (Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives, Frederick R Karl, p. 826).
So no, perhaps this is not Conrad at his best — but it’s still Conrad, and that’s good enough for a diehard fan like me.
Duration: 11 hr 14 min. On Librivox
When I first read this novel as a young man, I remember being disappointed that it turned out not to be much about spying, and that so many of the characters seemed awfully seedy. On listening to the collaborative reading on Librivox (the first audiobook Librivox ever released), I was gobsmacked that I had missed so much, and was struck by Conrad’s ability to milk every ounce of pathos and bitter irony from a succession of well-sustained dramatic scenes.
Believing (mistakenly, as it turned out) that there was no solo reading of this work already in the Librivox catalogue, I decided to record one of my own — only to find Cori Samuel’s wonderful reading after I had begun. By then, though, I had discovered how much pleasure I could get from reading the work of a great writer out loud, and there could be no turning back.
Duration: 10 hr 14 min. On Librivox
This Post Has 4 Comments
Thank you, Peter, for your light touch on Conrad’s exceptional work. I can’t help seeing the actor Jared Harris, however, in my mind’s eye, when I hear your voice!
Best wishes to a long, prosperous writing career, which your readings of this master, among others, has informed.
Thank you so much, Tracy. Very flattered to be thought of as Jared Harris — though what a sad end was his in “Mad Men”!
Hi Peter, I have very much appreciated your reading style on Librivox. You don’t attempt to insert any drama or emotion of your own making, instead respecting and faithfully portraying what the author has expressed. Given the intensity of the story lines you are drawn to, your understated voice performance is all the more powerful. I am re-listening to your readings of the first 2 of the Ford Madox Ford Parade’s End novels and I hope that you will soon be tackling A Man Could Stand Up, which I believe has moved into the public domain (at least here in the US) as of this year. Am I a fool to hope that something good will ultimately happen to Christopher?
Thank you for contributing your considerable skills to keeping these public domain classics alive.
Nancy, that’s very kind of you. In fact, prompted by yourself (yes, truly), I’m going to make “A Man Could Stand Up” my next reading after the one I’m working on now.