Recommendations
Books Like Lord Jim
What to read after Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900) is the great novel of a man trying to outrun his own failure — Jim's jump from the sinking Patna, his disgrace, and his long attempt to redeem himself in a Malay community that makes him their lord. If you were drawn to its moral seriousness and its portrait of the distance between who we think we are and who we turn out to be, these novels will find you in the same territory.
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
The essential companion — Marlow's journey up the Congo to find Kurtz; Conrad published Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim almost simultaneously, both narrated by Marlow, both set in the colonial world; where Lord Jim is about an Englishman trying to redeem a failure of honor, Heart of Darkness is about what the colonial enterprise does to the Europeans who pursue it
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Nostromo
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad's most ambitious novel — a fictional South American republic, a silver mine, and the corruption that follows the mine's 'material interests' through every class and nationality; generally considered his masterwork and the most complete expression of his political vision; the natural next Conrad after Lord Jim
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The Quiet American
by Graham Greene
The British journalist Fowler and the American idealist Pyle in 1950s Vietnam — Greene is the writer most directly in Conrad's tradition; where Lord Jim is about an English colonial officer whose idealism fails the test of reality, The Quiet American is about an American whose idealism is itself a form of violence
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Billy Budd, Sailor
by Herman Melville
Billy Budd, a handsome and innocent sailor who kills his accuser and is hanged by a captain who believes him innocent but believes even more in law — the American companion to Lord Jim in the naval tradition; Melville and Conrad are the two great nineteenth-century novelists of the sea, and Billy Budd and Lord Jim are both about what happens when a good man encounters a moral system that destroys him
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Things Fall Apart
by Chinua Achebe
Okonkwo in Umuofia as colonialism arrives — Achebe's novel is an implicit response to the Conrad tradition that Lord Jim belongs to; it shows the African perspective on the world Conrad depicts from the European side; the essential companion to Conrad for any serious reading of the colonial period in fiction
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An Outcast of the Islands
by Joseph Conrad
Conrad's second novel — Willems, a Dutch trader in the Malay Archipelago who betrays his benefactor for a woman; a prequel of sorts to Almayer's Folly, Conrad's first novel; not as accomplished as Lord Jim but set in the same world, with the same moral preoccupations, and a useful companion for readers who want more Conrad
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The Power and the Glory
by Graham Greene
A whisky priest in Mexico during the Cristero War — Greene's most fully realized exploration of failure, cowardice, and grace; the theological dimension makes it a more complex companion to Lord Jim than The Quiet American: where Jim seeks secular redemption through honor, Greene's priest seeks religious redemption through the same unavoidable catastrophic failure
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The Razor's Edge
by W. Somerset Maugham
Larry Darrell, an American who refuses to pursue the conventional life expected of him after World War One — Maugham is the popular novelist most directly in Conrad's tradition; where Jim is destroyed by his failure to live up to his ideal of himself, Larry is destroyed by his refusal to give up on the ideal; both novels are about what it costs to take seriousness seriously
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