Other editions of book Chance by Joseph Conrad, Fiction, Classics

Chance is narrated by Conrad’s regular narrator, Charles Marlow, but is characterised by a complex, nested narrative in which different narrators take up the story at different points and attempt to interpret various episodes in the life of Miss de Barral, the daughter of a convicted swindler named Smith de Barral (though this character is famous in the world of the novel as a criminal, he may, at least at first, have been merely an incompetent banker). Miss de Barral leads a sheltered life while her father is prosperous, then must rely on the generosity of others, who resent her or have agendas for her, before she escapes by marrying one Captain Anthony. Much of the book involves the musing of the various narrators over what she and the Captain expected from this union, and what they actually got from it. When her father is released from prison, he joins them on ship, and the book heads towards its denouement Joseph Conrad was a Polish-born novelist who spent most of his adult life in Britain. He is regarded as one of the greatest English novelists, which is even more notable because he did not learn to speak English well until he was in his 20s. Conrad is recognized as a master prose stylist. Some of his works have a strain of romanticism, but more importantly he is recognized as an important forerunner of Modernist literature. Writing during the apogee of the British Empire, Conrad drew upon his experiences in the British Merchant Navy. In 1894, at the age of 36, he left the sea to become an English author. His first novel, Almayer’s Folly, set on the east coast of Borneo and was published in 1895.Conrad’s narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, John Maxwell Coetzee as well as Jerzy Kosinski and inspired such films as Apocalypse Now (drawn from Heart of Darkness). Joseph Conrad died of a heart attack, and was interred in Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, England.

I believe he had seen us out of the window coming off to dine in the dinghy of a fourteen– ton yawl belonging to Marlow my host and skipper. We helped the boy we had with us to haul the boat up on the landing–stage before we went up to the riverside inn, where we found our new acquaintance eating his dinner in dignified loneliness at the head of a long table, white and inhospitable like a snow bank. The red tint of his clear–cut face with trim short black whiskers under a cap of curly iron– grey hair was the only warm spot in the dinginess of that room cooled by the cheerless tablecloth. We knew him already by sight as the owner of a little five–ton cutter, which he sailed alone apparently, a fellow yachtsman in the unpretending band of fanatics who cruise at the mouth of the Thames. But the first time he addressed the waiter sharply as 'steward' we knew him at once for a sailor as well as a yachtsman. Presently he had occasion to reprove that same waiter for the slovenly manner in which the dinner was served. He did it with considerable energy and then turned to us. "If we at sea," he declared, "went about our work as people ashore high and low go about theirs we should never make a living. No one would employ us. And moreover no ship navigated and sailed in the happy–go– lucky manner people conduct their business on shore would ever arrive into port." Since he had retired from the sea he had been astonished to discover that the educated people were not much better than the others. No one seemed to take any proper pride in his work: from plumbers who were simply thieves to, say, newspaper men (he seemed to think them a specially intellectual class) who never by any chance gave a correct version of the simplest affair. This universal inefficiency of what he called "the shore gang" he ascribed in general to the want of responsibility and to a sense of security.

Excerpt from Chance, Vol. 2 of 2: A Tale in Two Parts I have said that the story of Flora de Barral was imparted to me in stages. At this stage I did not see Marlow for some time. At last, one evening rather early, very soon after dinner, he turned up in my rooms. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.