Showing results for "Conrad's Shadow" in Literature & Fiction

Written at the start of the Great War, when his son Borys was at the Western Front, The Shadow-Line is Conrad's supreme effort to open man's eyes to the meaning of war through the stimulus of art. In many ways an autobiographical narrative, this masterpiece of his final period relates the story of a young and inexperienced sea captain whose first command finds him with a ship becalmed in tropical seas and a crew smitten with fever.

The Shadow Line tells the story of a young man whose dream to be a captain of his ship comes true accidentally. He should command a boat from Bangkok to Singapore filled with sick passengers. His crew gets infected by malaria, and he finds out the medicine necessary to save them is missing deliberately after a couple of days wandering in the sea with no wind in sight. His mate convinces him that the ghost of the previous captain, who before his death turned insane and wanted to take the ship down along himself and the crew, has cursed them.

An unsettling tale of plague, drift and terror, The Shadow-Line documents a young seaman’s coming of age after he is recruited to captain a ship for the first time. Bad luck and disease haunt the inexperienced hero and his crew, and the evil legacy of the previous captain overshadows them with a feeling of supernatural menace.

Written in 1915, The Shadow-Line is based upon events and experiences from twenty-seven years earlier to which Conrad returned obsessively in his fiction. A young sea captain's first command brings with it a succession of crises: his sea is becalmed, the crew laid low by fever, and his deranged first mate is convinced that the ship is haunted by the malignant spirit of a previous captain.

La linea d'ombra, pubblicato per la prima volta nel 1917, è un romanzo che riflette profondamente le esperienze e le riflessioni del suo autore...