Joseph Conrad's complete works in Polish may be downloaded from the Internet, and read on a minuscule pda. Electronic Conrad for the people fly to exotic vacation. Conrad: timeless and old-fashioned. He was a great writer, final stop: thousands and thousands of pages on moral dilemmas and choices, thousand of suggestive depictions on the anxious beauty of the oceans. But also a shocking lack of proportion, at least for me as a reader, when Conrad's ships approach the coast, a terrible lack of political correctness, and a total lack of curiosity of the world.
Europocentric criteria and judgments. The twilight of 'drowing room anthropology'. I have switched off the potentiometers of Conrad's ships and crew, and try to hearing what Conrad himself deemed uninteresting, although it must have been audible then - and ist lost today. The traces of this hearing are included in the 11-minute nocturne Conrad's Seven Islands. But there is so much more in Bronislaw Malinowski's Diary, and even in the short stories of William Somerset Maugham. (the note by Lidia Zielinska, from the 2007 ‘Warsaw Autumn’ programme book)
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