#82 The Lagoon- Joseph Conrad
Having only read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, I was very
excited to read this one. Like that tale, The Lagoon begins on a vessel in dark
and mysterious tropical waters. He must stop in an Indonesian lagoon at the hut
of a Malaysian man, Arsat who it is said: “Such a man can disturb the course of
fate by glances or words.”
This is not a place he and his crew would like to stay: “They
would have preferred to spend the night somewhere else than on this lagoon of
weird aspect and ghostly reputation.”
Arsat is nursing his sick love and while she suffers, Arsat
tells his tale. He believes he betrayed his brother to be with this woman, and
has been living with that weight. When the tale ends, the woman dies and the
sun rises as if that weight and guilt has cleared.
Conrad has such a fiercely intense style of prose. Just once
in my life I’d like to be able to write a sentence like this one:
“In that fleeting and powerful disturbance of his being the
earth enfolded in the starlight peace became a shadowy country of inhuman
strife, a battle-field of phantoms terrible and charming, august or ignoble,
struggling ardently for the possession of our helpless hearts. An unquiet and
mysterious country of inextinguishable desires and fears.”
Or this one:
“The fear and fascination, the inspiration and the wonder of
death—of death near, unavoidable and unseen, soothed the unrest of his race and
stirred the most indistinct, the most intimate of his thoughts.”
Notable Passage: “In the stillness of the air every tree,
every leaf, every bough, every tendril of creeper, and every petal of minute
blossoms seemed to have bewitched into an immobility perfect and final.”
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