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Audiobook1 hour
The Secret Sharer
Written by Joseph Conrad
Narrated by Cathy Dobson
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
When the new captain takes over command of his first ship for the homeward voyage from the Gulf of Siam, he surprises his crew by taking the first nightwatch himself. While alone on deck he is surprised to find a lone swimmer in the sea who comes on board. The stranger is a murderer escaping justice, but is also eerily an almost exact doppelganger of the captain himself. Not only does he look identical, but the two almost seem to share the same thoughts and secrets.
Rather than turn his fugitive-double over to the authorities, the captain hides him in his own cabin. But on such a small ship the situation is untenable. Discovery is inevitable unless he can devise a way to let his alter ego escape before they start the long voyage across the ocean.
A gripping and multi-layered story which leaves as many questions open as it answers. Conrad at his best.
Rather than turn his fugitive-double over to the authorities, the captain hides him in his own cabin. But on such a small ship the situation is untenable. Discovery is inevitable unless he can devise a way to let his alter ego escape before they start the long voyage across the ocean.
A gripping and multi-layered story which leaves as many questions open as it answers. Conrad at his best.
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Author
Joseph Conrad
Polish-born Joseph Conrad is regarded as a highly influential author, and his works are seen as a precursor to modernist literature. His often tragic insight into the human condition in novels such as Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent is unrivalled by his contemporaries.
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Reviews for The Secret Sharer
Rating: 3.6906476187050363 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
139 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Conrad's subversive little tale will leave the reader questioning what is real, what defines morality and authority, and leave an aching doubt about the nature of male-bonding...within fewer than a hundred pages.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A good tight story. Well written, compelling. A great writer doesn't have to be obtuse or arcane -- Conrad proves it here.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A great, unassuming, evocative "sea" piece that raises questions of identity, loneliness, belonging and...leadership? Yep, I read that this is required reading on some Harvard list of necessary texts on leadership. I can see (sea?) that. I always forget how good Conrad can be until I get around to reading another one.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brilliant book. Well narrated.
Joseph Conrad has to rank very highly in the Pantheon of writers. Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent being two of his best. - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Marvelous, almost magical writing that transports the reader. Never gets old, listening to Conrad, even when the reader is a robot.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I inherited Conrad's collected works from my grandfather, and this story was included.I wrote this review for Goodreads's Short Story Club.I didn’t find the story easily comprehensible and the extensive nautical jargon didn’t improve matters. It was the narrator’s first position as captain. He was a stranger to the other officers and crew members, a stranger to the ship and “somewhat of a stranger to myself”. What does he mean by this enigmatic statement - a stranger to himself? I can’t see that he explains it elsewhere in the story, though he may have done. The captain (what is his name?) rescues a man, Leggatt, from the sea; he had been chief mate in a ship called the Sephora, moored nearby. He had accidentally killed another officer and jumped into the sea to escape eventual prosecution. The captain sees Leggatt is no homicidal maniac”, believes his story and thus agrees to hide him. He manges to conceal him in his cabin and gives him a grey “sleeping suit” just like he himself wears. The captain keeps referring to Leggatt as his double. He feels Leggatt is just like himself. He and Leggatt are “”the two strangers in the ship”. Leggatt is the captain’s “other self”. At one point the captain felt “doubly vexed” and “dual more than ever”. Why is the narrator, the captain, so fixated on regarding Leggatt as his “secret self”, a man similar to himself? He also comes to doubt whether Leggatt really is there. “Can it be” --- “that he is not visible to other eyes than mine?” “It was like being haunted.” He feels more comfortable when down below with Leggatt than with any of the others. He feels he is “near insanity”” whereas Leggatt is sane. Conrad uses many words to indicate that things are not as they seem, that they are unreal, for example, “phantom” as in “silent like a phantom sea”. My dictionary defines “phantom” as “not really existing”. Also “dreamy”, as in “a dreamy contemplative appearance”. It seems as if the captain may have some sort of mental problem and sees himself split into two. “And it was as if the ship had two captains”. The captain and Leggatt resemble each other and both wear “sleeping suits” which fact gives us the connotation of the whole thing being a dream. The captain states that part of himself is absent. He refers to “that mental feeling of being in two places at once”. To the consternation of the other officers, the captain agrees to manoeuvre the ship close to some islands so as to allow Leggatt to leave the ship and be able to survive. Leggatt, the captain’s second self, is “a free man --- striking out for a new destiny”. At the end there is a reference to “the gateway of Erebus”. According to my dictionary, Erebus is “the gloomy caverns underground through which the Shades had to walk in their passage to Hades”. To sum up, I will say that it was hard to interpret what Conrad meant to communicate to us by his story. Was he trying to illuminate some sort of psychological split in the captain? Is the whole experience some sort of dream? Is it significant that we never learn the captain’s name, as though he didn’t really exist?