Review by New York Times Review
I TURNED MY BACK ON reading Joseph Conrad in 1967. This was also the year that I published "A Grain of Wheat," my third novel, which I wrote soon after reading Conrad's "Under Western Eyes." 1 could not put words to what repelled me, because, despite the unease, his influence on my work was unmistakable, and long lasting. "A Grain of Wheat" marked a dramatic shift for me away from the linear plots and single points of view of my first two novels to the multiple narrative voices and diverse temporal and geographic spaces of my later works. The difference in style was a result of my encounter with Conrad. The majesty and musicality of his wellstructured sentences had so thrilled me as a young writer that 1 could cure a bout of writer's block simply by listening to the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony or reading the opening pages of Conrad's "Nostramo." ft instantly brought my mojo back. 1 am not alone in being so impacted. In Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Hundred Years of Solitude," the sweep of history and dictatorships that litter the social landscape of the novel reminded me strongly of "Nostramo," Conrad's complex epic about an imaginary South American republic. Garcia Marquez's title even seems to nod at the fictional historical tome contained within Conrad's novel: "Fifty Years of Misrule." In her fascinating book, "The Dawn Watch," the Harvard professor Maya Jasanoff offers detailed background on the evolution of Conrad's books, describing how each was a sort of reckoning with Western conquest and advancing globalization. We learn, for example, that "Nostramo" was written as Conrad delved into the oral and written sources about the "liberation" of Latin America that often ended in Western-backed dictatorship. As he was writing, he was taking in news of the crisis over the Panama Canal, an episode of political and military manipulation in which America emerged as a new, wily imperial power. In other words, Conrad and Garcia Márquez were drawing from the same well of post-colonial Latin American history. In the same way, Conrad and Chinua Achebe are also connected. And yet, Achebe led the charge against Conrad. In 1975 the Nigerian novelist delivered a lecture, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness," which was then published as an essay. He built on the insights of the groundbreaking literary critic Es'kia Mphahlele, who accused Europeans like Conrad of depicting Africans as acted on by history instead of making it. Achebe went ever further, calling Conrad a "bloody racist." This critical perspective has become an inevitable companion to any discussion of the writer's work. Jasanoff herself uses it to frame her quest for a more complex vision of Conrad. Achebe's essay helped explain what 1 had found repellent in Conrad's work and why I'd stopped reading him. In the novels set in the outer reaches of European empire the native characters always seemed to merge with their environment, reminiscent of the Hegelian image of Africa as a land of childhood still enveloped in the dark mantle of the night. 1 accepted everything Achebe said about Conrad's biases. And yet, 1 could not wholly embrace Achebe's overwhelmingly negative view of "Heart of Darkness" or Conrad in general. Somehow, the essay failed to explain what had once attracted me: Conrad's ability to capture the hypocrisy of the "civilizing mission" and the material interests that drove capitalist empires, crushing the human spirit. Jasanoff does not forgive Conrad his blindness, but she does try to present his perspective on the changing, troubled world he traveled, a perspective that still has strong resonance today. In "Heart of Darkness," Conrad's literary stand-in Charles Marlow talks of imperialism as a form of robbery accompanied by violence and aggravated murder on a grand scale. Colonial ventures are mostly about taking the earth away "from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves." This captures, in one sentence, capitalism's racist roots in slavery and conquest. Conrad also anticipated a capitalist system's capacity to dismantle societies, a point he illustrated through his depiction of Mr. Holroyd, the cynical American silver and steel tycoon in "Nostramo." Jasanoff does an excellent job pulling on all these threads. I suspect Achebe missed this side of Conrad because he didn't stop to consider the diabolical character of Kurtz, the brilliant station agent gone rogue whom it is Marlow's task to retrieve. In "Heart of Darkness," the final image of Kurtz, the man of light and reason, is one of him hedged by human heads, capturing the horror of imperialism and the hollowness of the enlightenment philosophy with which colonialism wrapped itself, ft is a scene reminiscent of Marx's comparison of bourgeois progress to the pagan idol who drank nectar but only from the skulls of the slain. Congo was littered with 10 million skulls, the work of civilized hunters for rubber and ivory to meet the greed of King Leopold of Belgium. The Conrad who was able to imagine Kurtz in this way is often obscured by Marlow, Conrad's literary alter ego. In "The Dawn Watch," Jasanoff goes behind the mask and, like Stanley in search of Livingstone, or Marlow in search of Kurtz, sets out to find the elusive Conrad by tracing the physical, historical, biographical and literary footsteps of the writer. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, in a Poland then under the thumb of czarist Russia and to parents engrossed in the struggle for independence, he later becomes a homeless traveler of the oceans, and eventually ended up as Joseph Conrad, an English-speaking citizen of the most global of the European capitalist empires of the time. Jasanoff returns Conrad to all of these contexts, understanding what impact they had on his novels. In the process, she becomes a detective piecing together the incidents big and small that formed classics like "Lord Jim," "Heart of Darkness," "Under Western Eyes" and "Nostramo." She helps us make sense of the seeming contradictory decision on Conrad's part to write about the effect of empire but never set his novels in any of the colonial possessions of his adopted homeland, Britain, letting their actions unfold in mostly Dutch, Belgian and Spanish colonies. And yet he remains one of us, a literary brother to Achebe. As Jasanoff reminds us, Conrad and his family were victims of the Russian Empire. Achebe and his people were victims of a Western empire. Both writers embraced English; Achebe talks of it as a gift which he intended to use. Jasanoff describes an incident in which Conrad, after delivering the manuscript of "Under Western Eyes," broke down, becoming delirious and mumbling to himself in Polish for weeks, ft wasn't the manuscript that triggered this collapse but rather a heated exchange with his agent in which, as Conrad later reminded him, "You told me that '1 did not speak English' to you." This Conrad may have looked at imperialism through the eyes of both a deracinated Polish nationalist and of a grateful member of the British Empire. His art, which he defined as the capacity to make readers hear, feel and see, was able to capture the contradictions within empires and the resistance to them. This is the Conrad who comes alive in Jasanoff's masterful study. "The Dawn Watch" will become a creative companion to all students of his work, ft has made me want to re-establish connections with the Conrad whose written sentences once inspired in me the same joy as a musical phrase. Chinua Achebe led the charge against Conrad, calling him a "bloody racist."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Whitman may have rhapsodized in Passage to India over the global connections rapidly unifying the world, but a nineteenth-century, Polish-born seaman named Joseph Conrad looked at the rapidly globalizing planet through far more skeptical eyes. Jasanoff invites readers to ponder what Conrad saw as he surveyed a rapidly evolving planet. Readers watch as the young Conrad who learned to hate the Russian imperialism that denied him a homeland spends years serving on British ships that help the United Kingdom enlarge its own imperial reach. Readers will then marvel at how this intrepid sailor converts his seafaring experience with surprising mastery of a language acquired as an adult into compelling novels, such as Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, that exposed the raw self-interest (and worse) hidden behind imperialists' cant about civilization and progress. Deftly melding biographical narration, historical analysis, and literary explication, Jasanoff lets readers glimpse in Conrad's fiction the fate of vulnerable individuals who ventured too far in a world rapidly losing its boundaries. And as one who despite the cost and the danger has retraced many of Conrad's journeys, Jasanoff compellingly asserts the novelist's continuing relevance as an interpreter of our (post)modern geopolitical and cultural perplexities. Certain to attract both history buffs and those drawn to literary biography.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Harvard historian Jasanoff (Liberty's Exiles) undertakes a review of Joseph Conrad's life and work that broadens into an acute, original study of 19th-century European imperialism and an emergent globalized world. Polish-born Conrad (1857-1924) was an accomplished seaman before he turned to writing, having learned English as an adult and picked up on the craft of fiction in part from reading Charles Dickens. He became one of England's most celebrated authors and prose stylists. Jasanoff's vivid descriptions of Conrad's travels enrich this narrative. From the extraction of ivory to the impact of rubber demand, she describes the dreadful Belgian colonial trade that Conrad knew firsthand, having worked briefly on a Congo riverboat, a job that he detested and in which he encountered a "European regime of appalling greed, violence, and hypocrisy" that informed his novels. But Jasanoff's more anachronistic language, such as a description of her subject as "a dead white man" who was "alarmingly prejudiced" by contemporary standards, gives the impression that she is judging him by today's very different moral standards. Despite this, Jasanoff's skillfully written book makes a persuasive case that Conrad was "one of us: a citizen of a global world." Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Historian Jasanoff (Coolidge Professor of History, Harvard Univ.; Liberty's Exiles) combines biography, history, and literary study in this work about writer Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) and his sources and influences. She examines how he derived the themes of four of his major works-The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo-from his experiences as a sailor and a citizen of the world. These themes dominated Conrad's approach and literary imagination, permitting him to take the experiences that he lived and saw and turn them into literary gold. Recurring themes in his work, such as the futility of nationalist ideals, are based on personal events and real incidences. Progress came with discontents, setbacks, and problems. Jasanoff acknowledges other, more traditional biographies of Conrad and is especially indebted to one by Zdzislaw Najder, owing to its research on Conrad's early life. Her work is profusely illustrated with maps and photographs. VERDICT Highly recommended for all collections and for readers who have a special affection for the life and works of this great novelist. [See Prepub Alert, 5/7/17.]-Morris Hounion, New York City Coll. of Technology, Brooklyn © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An absorbing biography melds history and literary analysis.Jasanoff (History/Harvard Univ.; Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World, 2011, etc.), who has won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and the George Washington Book Prize, asserts that the novels of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) "meditate on how to behave in a globalizing world," where characters "confront some critical choice, only to face consequences more far-ranging than they ever imagined." Drawing on Conrad's many works of fiction, memoir, letters, and essays, Jasanoff focuses especially on his most famous novelsThe Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromoto reveal how he responded to a roiling age plagued by anarchy, revolution, and oppression. His characters "struggle with displacement, alienation, and despair," caused by both external and internal forces. Conrad, Jasanoff reveals, was "perpetually depressed, incorrigibly cynical, alarmingly prejudiced" against Asians and Jews, and beset by childhood experiences that inspired his "fatalistic sense of the world as a realm where, no matter how hard you tried to make your own way, you might never slip the tracks of destiny." As a teenager, he set out alone from his native Poland, then under Russian domination, determined to become a seaman; in 1878, he arrived in cosmopolitan London and began a career in the merchant marine, rising to the rank of captain over the next 20 years. Travels throughout the world fueled his imagination. During voyages to Asia, he "stowed away landscapes, characters, and plots" that inspired "half of everything Conrad ever published." In rich detail, Jasanoff skillfully contextualizes his work within "a chain of historical events" that led to profound social and political change. Heart of Darkness, for example, was "closely pegged" to King Leopold II's ruthless exploitation of the Congo. Jasanoff focuses less on Conrad's family life (his wife and sons are lightly sketched) than on the prescient "global compass" of his literary works. An insightful perspective on Conrad's life and turbulent times. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
