ebook, 278 pages
Paperback, 320 pages
Published: 1902
Edition: Penguin Classics (2007)
Edited with an Introduction, Notes and Glossaries by: J. H. Stape (2007)
Four classic stories of the sea by Joseph Conrad: Typhoon (1902), Amy Foster (1901), Falk (1903) and Tomorrow (1902)
These powerful stories, as Conrad critic Paul Kirschner has observed, present βa chiaroscuro of sea and land life in an alternating rhythm of hope and despair.β In "Typhoon" , a storm upends a captainβs complacency, hurling him and his crew into a terrifying battle with nature. "Amy Foster" , tells the story of an Eastern European immigrant shipwrecked off the coast of England, and his ultimately doomed love affair with the dim-witted Amy Foster. In" Falk" , the protagonist harbors a terrible secret that inhibits his ability to confront the woman he loves and find the wife he longs for. And in "Tomorrow" , the son of a retired sea captain, who has been waiting years for his boy to come home, finally returns, but only because he is destitute and needs money.
In these four stories, written between 1900 and 1902, Joseph Conrad bid gradual farewell to his adventurous life at sea and began to confront the more daunting complexities of life on land in the twentieth century. In 'Typhoon' Conrad reveals, in the steadfast courage of an undemonstrative captain and the imaginative readiness of his young first mate, the differences between instinct and intelligence in a partnership vital to human survival. 'Falk', the companion sea-story, contrasts, as Conrad once put it, 'common sentimentalism with the frank standpoint of a more or less primitive man', a man with a conscience, however, about the girl he desires. In one of the 'land-stories' Conrad explores the utter isolation of an East European emigrant in England; in the other, the plight of a woman ironically trapped by the unwitting alliance of two retired widowers - each blind in his own way.