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An Outcast of the Islands (Oxford World's Classics) |  | Author: Joseph Conrad
Creators: J. H. Stape, Hans van Marle
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
Buy Used: $4.50
as of 9/3/2010 08:47 PDT details
You Save: $8.45 (65%)
Seller: Infinite Jest Bookshop
Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 796184
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reissue
Pages: 352
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 7.6 x 5 x 0.9
ISBN: 0199554633
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.912
EAN: 9780199554638
ASIN: 0199554633
Publication Date: April 15, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The only annotated edition available, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Conrad's second novel, is a tale of intrigue in an eastern setting. Peter Willems, a clerk in Macassar, granted a "second chance" at a remote river trading post, falls ever more hopelessly into traps set by himself and others. A parable of human frailty, with love and death the major players, this is a story of a man unable to understand others and fated never to possess his own soul.
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| Customer Reviews:
 The Offensiveness of Existence January 14, 2009
Joshua Avram (Los Angeles, CA USA)
There's something almost pathological about the style and plotting of Joseph Conrad's An Outcast of the Islands. Reading it, one has the sense not of an artist explicating an idea, but of a man picking obsessively at a festering wound. "His story is not so much told as seen intermittently through a haze of sentences," H.G. Wells wrote of the book upon its release, and it's a fair judgment. The atmosphere of Outcast isn't merely built; it seeps from its author as if he were an emanating god in some theosophical or Qabbalistic cosmogony. In Conrad's universe, nature itself seems complicit in the downfall of men, and the weight of it is almost stifling at times for a reader.
Writing in 1896, Wells also regarded Outcast as "the finest piece of fiction published this year." That judgment is more problematic. Outcast was Conrad's second novel and would also be the second in his Malay trilogy. Typical of Conrad and his uniqueness as an author, Outcast moves backwards rather than forwards in time from the story of his first book, Almayer's Folly, and shifts the primary perspective away from Almayer, a trader in a remote Malayan outpost, to his boss Lingard and the outcast of the title, a clerk named Willems. While evidence can be found throughout the book of Conrad's facility as a stylist--its opening sentences alone signal that Conrad is an author to be reckoned with--it also suffers from limited characterization and what one critic, Tim Middleton (Joseph Conrad: Routledge Guides to Literature), has rightly called an "overwrought" and "hackneyed" plot.
"The doomed man" is a character that Conrad writes as well as probably anyone in literature, but the shaft that must be mined in order to reach that level of insight is too deep and dark to allow for much light to be cast on the nature of other characters. To criticize Conrad for two-dimensional characterization of women or indigenes is banal at this point, but nonetheless necessary; it limits Outcast's effectiveness and adds to the impression that, at its worst, the book is essentially nihilistic melodrama, if there could be such a thing. As Ross Slotten writes in The Heretic in Darwin's Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace, "Conrad himself had traveled through the East Indies between 1881 and 1889 but did not learn Malay and was unable to firmly grasp the Malay or Papuan character." That human and linguistic shortcoming stands in stark contrast to the anthropological interest displayed by Wallace, whose The Malay Archipelago influenced Conrad and was regarded by him as a "favorite bedside companion."
One final thing: the 1966 Airmont edition of An Outcast of the Islands has very small and crowded type, so if you're looking for a used copy, stick with Oxford.
 Racial Hatred, Racial Lust January 14, 2009
Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Much -- perhaps too much -- has been written and said about Conrad's racism and/or racialism. By the second term, I mean the predilection of Conrad's contemporaries to explain culture and character by innate racial differences. In that sense, 'race' is one of Conrad's central themes, especially in The Outcast of the Islands, and Conrad is a bona fide quasi-Darwinist believer in racial determinism. Most of Conrad's 'South Sea' adventure novels are built around the clash of races. Again and again, both whites and non-whites devolve, degenerate, dissipate in reaction to each other. One might even say that Conrad is hugely antagonistic to and cynical about the white race in its colonial phase. Three of the white characters in Outcast - Hudig, Almayer, and Willems - mate with non-white women and father half-white children, and in every case the outcome is disastrous for all concerned. The contemptuous language that white characters spout about non-whites in Conrad's novels has earned him hostility from modern non-white readers, but wait! the non-whites in Conrad's novels are just as vituperative and derogatory about whites. Does Conrad take sides? It seems to me that he treats both sides rather harshly. Does Conrad really 'understand' his non-white characters? Now that's a good question, which I'm not anthropologist enough to answer. But it's clear that Conrad is pessimistic about the colonial encounter and the globalization of economic interests, that he perceives only obsessive, blind conflict leading to destruction for both sides. At this point in history, I wouldn't dare fault him as a prophet.
Conrad is also a writer of his times in his consistent portrayal of Nature as powerfully indifferent to humankind's fate, animate yet without animus, a constant beautiful perilous prolific Nature that will outlast humanity, that implicitly mocks humanity's piddling drama and self-importance. Such was the portrayal of nature by Stephen Crane, Thomas Hardy, Jack London and other contemporaries of Conrad. The chief difference is in how gorgeously Conrad describes Nature, how well he treads the line between the emotional perceptions of Nature as "meaningful" for his characters and his own aloof awareness of Nature's unconcern.
Outcast is, briefly, a love story, then a hate story. Sexual energies are seldom beneficent in Conrad, and his women characters are no doubt his weakest. As a previous reviewer, Herr Schneider, aptly points out, the woman Aissa in Outcast is utterly implausible if you stop to analyze her expressions. By the time she begins to have a voice, however, any reader like me will be so caught up in the rip-roaring emotional and physical violence of this novel that he/she will suspend all doubts quite willingly.
The Outcast was Conrad's second novel, but curiously it has more syntactical tangles than Almayer's Folly, his first. One does have to wonder whether editors or colleagues played a role in Conrad's phenomenal command of his third language. Outcast seems to me to start very well, then drift for a few chapters, but then to build in tension and in verbal virtuosity along a parabolic curve of excitement. I swear, I read the 55 pages of the final Part Five without taking a breath.
 Book for the Die Hard Conrad fans- NOT for the casual reader July 3, 2003
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
I love any book by Joseph Conrad and am on my way to reading just about everything he wrote. My next goal is to re-read it all again.However, Outcast of the Island is not a "GREAT" book or piece of literature. It is interesting and worth reading especially if you like Conrad. I see it as a colonial/romance novel critical of the "British Empire" and of a man caught in the empire trade game who is led by his own devices to survive in his own game. I like the descriptions of the exotic location, the dangerous love interest, and everything that is Conrad in style. His writing style is too generous in his early work. He could be more sparse (needs to put his language on a stairmaster and lean it down). Anyway, I don't want to be against the book. If you are actually thinking about it, then get it and read it. It's not long and is fairly entertaining. Bottome-line: First time Conrad readers go get a collection of his short stories. Everybody else-- sure why not.
A Powerful Tale of the Moral Destruction of a Man June 21, 1999
Chris Willett (cwillett@math.uiuc.edu) (Champaign, Illinois)
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
Conrad has a exciting style of writing which consists of artfully mixed poetic prose and moral analysis. The language of the text alone is enough to make this a great novel, perhaps even an epic poem. The intensity of the prose is such that I was driven backwards into my seat for most of the novel. A prequel to _Almayer's Folly_, An Outcast...is a true must read.
A powerful tale of greed and passion January 28, 1999
Robert Moore (Chicago, IL USA)
17 out of 17 found this review helpful
AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS was both Conrad's second novel and the second novel in a trilogy of books featuring Almayer (the first book being ALMAYER'S FOLLY and the third Conrad's final novel, THE RESCUE), who is a major minor character in this one after being the major character in his first novel. This novel is not as strong an effort as the novels from his major phase, but it is nonetheless a book of great power and wonderfully illustrates most of the great themes that run through all of his books. I have a love-hate relationship with Conrad, because while I respond to the marvelously depicted male characters in his books (his women are usually implausibly stupid and cardboardish) and their conflicts with the universe and each other, I find the world he describes as being a little too bleak and the cosmos far too impersonal. All of his characters are doomed to ineffecual action, and their fates are determined by forces and factors outside of themselves, or perhaps to some degree by motives within themselves over which they have no power. I do not like Conrad's universe, but I admit the power of his creation.This is not one of Conrad's greatest works. It belongs in a tier immediately below his very greatest works like NOSTROMO, THE SECRET AGENT, UNDER WESTERN EYES, HEART OF DARKNESS, LORD JIM, and VICTORY. Nonetheless, slightly lesser Conrad is more rewarding than major works of other writers, and I heartily recommend this novel (as well as his other books) to any serious reader.
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