AMY FOSTER by Joseph Conrad

“She stopped then, out of breath, and spoke to old Lewis, hammering there at a heap of stones; and the old chap, taking off his immense black wire goggles, got up on his shaky legs to look where she pointed. Together they followed with their eyes the figure of the man running over a field; they saw him fall down, pick himself up, and run on again, staggering and waving his long arms above his head,…”

This powerful emigrancy novelette (with vile migrant agencies sending people over the seas) seems to be in the same patterned synergy with MARY POSTGATE by Rudyard Kipling that I happened to read and review yesterday HERE. Instead of falling out of the sky, this strange long-armed man called Yanko Goorall on his way to America from Central Europe is shipwrecked (who the little girl in the red frock was, I am still unsure) on the coast of England into a community, a blight of a bay, of leaden locals walking with souls downturned, prejudiced against any strangers such as Yanko…
The local doctor introduces me to many of its local characters and traits, while Yanko’s strangeness somehow evolves into his lithe leaping over stiles, and the making of holy crosses as signs, and he seems to attract the unimaginative woman called Amy who had been the only one kind to him, but even she has to enter the attrition of waiting for him to die, but what of the son they produced together?
A fiction work rife with Yanko’s initial awe and confusion at the sights he sees from ship to shore, and his later dancing upon pub tables! And they never really understood him. A shipwrecked blessing or a curse? This story will certainly lurk somewhere in any old man’s soul who reads towards the last story that he will ever attritionally wait to read. But which story will it be? He won’t know till he has read it. Or begun the next. 

My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/05/30/joseph-conrad-the-secret-sharer/ and https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/06/22/the-lagoon-by-joseph-conrad/

Full context of this review: https://cernzoo.wordpress.com/the-penguin-books-of-the-british-short-story/