: Joseph Conrad
: A Set of Six
: Seltzer Books
: 9781455388134
: 1
: CHF 0.10
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 464
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Six short stories/novellas, including:GASPAR RUIZ, THE INFORMER, THE BRUTE, AN ANARCHIST, THE DUEL, and IL CONDE. According to Wikipedia: 'Joseph Conrad (1857 - 1924) was a Polish-born English novelist. Many critics regard him as one of the greatest novelists in the English language-a fact that is remarkable, as he did not learn to speak English fluently until he was in his twenties (and always with a strong Polish accent). He became a naturalized British subject in 1886. 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. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many writers, including Ernest Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino and J. M. Coetzee.'

A DESPERATE TALE, AN ANARCHIST


 

THAT year I spent the best two months of the dry season on one of the estates -- in fact, on the principal cattle estate -- of a famous meat-extract manufacturing company.

 

B.O.S. Bos. You have seen the three magic letters on the advertisement pages of magazines and news- papers, in the windows of provision merchants, and on calendars for next year you receive by post in the month of November. They scatter pamphlets also, written in a sickly enthusiastic style and in several languages, giving statistics of slaughter and bloodshed enough to make a Turk turn faint. The"art" illustrating that"literature" represents in vivid and shining colours a large and enraged black bull stamping upon a yellow snake writhing in emerald-green grass, with a cobalt- blue sky for a background. It is atrocious and it is an allegory. The snake symbolizes disease, weakness -- perhaps mere hunger, which last is the chronic disease of the majority of mankind. Of course everybody knows the B. 0. S. Ltd., with its unrivalled products: Vinobos, Jellybos, and the latest unequalled perfection, Tribos, whose nourishment is offered to you not only highly concentrated, but already half digested. Such apparently is the love that Limited Company bears to its fellowmen -- even as the love of the father and mother penguin for their hungry fledglings.

 

     Of course the capital of a country must be pro- ductively employed. I have nothing to say against the company. But being myself animated by feelings of affection towards my fellow-men, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility.

 

In various parts of the civilized and uncivilized world I have had to swallow B. 0. S. with more or less benefit to myself, though without great pleasure. Prepared with hot water and abundantly peppered to bring out the taste, this extract is not really unpalatable. But I have never swallowed its advertisements. Perhaps they have not gone far enough. As far as I can re- member they make no promise of everlasting youth to the users of B. 0. S., nor yet have they claimed the power of raising the dead for their estimable products. Why this austere reserve, I wonder? But I don't think they would have had me even on these terms. What- ever form of mental degradation I may (being but hu- man) be su