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The finest of all Conrad's tales, Heart of Darkness is set in an atmosphere of mystery and menace, and tells of Marlow's perilous journey up the Congo River to relieve his employer's agent, the renowned and formidable Mr. Kurtz. What he sees on his journey, and his eventual encounter with Kurtz, horrify and perplex him, and call into question the very bases of civilization and human nature. Endlessly reinterpreted by critics and adapted for film, radio, and television, the story shows Conrad at his most intense and sophisticated. The other three tales in this volume depict corruption and obsession, and question racial assumptions. Set in the exotic surroundings of Africa, Malaysia, and the east, they variously appraise the glamour, folly, and rapacity of imperial adventure. This revised edition uses the English first edition texts and has a new chronology and bibliography.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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About the author
Joseph Conrad
3,087 books4,850 followersJoseph Conrad was a Polish-British novelist and story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language and, although he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he became a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable, and amoral world.
Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.
Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in Lord Jim, for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.
Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche.
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May 18, 2019
Kylie Minogue, Joseph Conrad, the fascist state that was Queensland and how I came to realise that the star rating system may not be appropriate for this book. Part two.
As I have reviewed elsewhere in The Delinquents Lola (Kylie Minogue in the film of the book) liked Joseph Conrad and so do I, but not as much as some. I suspect that Lola was reading Conrad as boyfriend Brownie was away at sea in the early days of their relationship and perhaps she was attracted to the fact that Conrad wrote about the sea and sailing. This book of 3 short stories was all about that subject. One could imagine Lola wondering what it was about this attraction to the sea hence her reading Conrad. What I find interesting is that the author of The Delinquents, Criena Rohan, should have her books heroine reading such a dense author. I mean let’s be true to ourselves here, Conrad is no easy read. I came into this book expecting what I got, dark and dense paragraphs that had me rereading constantly. Is having to reread a good thing? Yes and no. Typical of books like this they can tend to pass over my tiny mind, the nuances as it were. Of the three tales Youth and The End of the Tether were easy to read and interesting stories in themselves without having me think I was reading classics. The Heart of Darkness on the other hand……… dense and deep. I was happy to reread passages but I wish it was not so. It can take away from the experience I suppose.
Though a noted classic in truth not for me personally. I get the reputation but something just did not grab me. Again it makes the star system kind of redundant in truth. How can I not give it 5 stars considering what it makes one think about? I finished The Heart of Darkness a good few days ago and have been thinking about it. In fact I played an audio version (something I had never done before) after finishing the read so as to get another voice as it were. In The Delinquents Brownie had snorted that if Joseph Conrad was a sailor he should have known better than to go writing about the sea – and who wanted to read about the sea anyway? Brownie would not have had the patience to even get past the first few pages I suspect. I can find no reference to Heart Of Darkness in the banned books lists in Qld. I presume that Lola may have got it from the library. I am going to give my copy to a young lass who I work with who is studying English Lit with a view to getting into the publishing industry. Hopefully she enjoys it.
As I have reviewed elsewhere in The Delinquents Lola (Kylie Minogue in the film of the book) liked Joseph Conrad and so do I, but not as much as some. I suspect that Lola was reading Conrad as boyfriend Brownie was away at sea in the early days of their relationship and perhaps she was attracted to the fact that Conrad wrote about the sea and sailing. This book of 3 short stories was all about that subject. One could imagine Lola wondering what it was about this attraction to the sea hence her reading Conrad. What I find interesting is that the author of The Delinquents, Criena Rohan, should have her books heroine reading such a dense author. I mean let’s be true to ourselves here, Conrad is no easy read. I came into this book expecting what I got, dark and dense paragraphs that had me rereading constantly. Is having to reread a good thing? Yes and no. Typical of books like this they can tend to pass over my tiny mind, the nuances as it were. Of the three tales Youth and The End of the Tether were easy to read and interesting stories in themselves without having me think I was reading classics. The Heart of Darkness on the other hand……… dense and deep. I was happy to reread passages but I wish it was not so. It can take away from the experience I suppose.
Though a noted classic in truth not for me personally. I get the reputation but something just did not grab me. Again it makes the star system kind of redundant in truth. How can I not give it 5 stars considering what it makes one think about? I finished The Heart of Darkness a good few days ago and have been thinking about it. In fact I played an audio version (something I had never done before) after finishing the read so as to get another voice as it were. In The Delinquents Brownie had snorted that if Joseph Conrad was a sailor he should have known better than to go writing about the sea – and who wanted to read about the sea anyway? Brownie would not have had the patience to even get past the first few pages I suspect. I can find no reference to Heart Of Darkness in the banned books lists in Qld. I presume that Lola may have got it from the library. I am going to give my copy to a young lass who I work with who is studying English Lit with a view to getting into the publishing industry. Hopefully she enjoys it.
November 12, 2024
“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”
“We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell.”
“We were wanderers on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy foliage. The steamer toiled on the edge of an incomprehensible frenzy. Were the prehistoric men cursing us, praying to us or welcoming us - who could tell?”
“It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, a cry that was no more than a breath - The horror! The horror!”
“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. Their bearing was offensive to me like outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend.”
“The tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombrely under an overcast sky and seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”
*************
Imagine this: you are a native Polish speaker and write one of the most influential novels in the English language, replete with references to ancient and modern history while being a sea captain to far flung parts of the globe. Well, that is what Joseph Conrad did in this 1899 novella. ‘Heart of Darkness’ was adapted into the Francis Ford Coppola film ‘Apocalypse Now’ in 1979. I rarely do this but I recommend getting the Oxford World Classics edition of the book for its frequent and in depth footnotes. Without these it is likely that many of the allusions would have flown over my head. Being of such an age the text is in the public domain and would also surely suffice. There is something in this tale that exudes a legend.
The story starts out with the captain Marlow expounding on his previous voyages in the far east and his desire to steam up the Congo, while he sits on the River Thames awaiting the tide to go out. Very quickly it is understood that Marlow is in fact Conrad by clues he left in the text, while plying a steamboat up the river. A prior captain had been murdered by locals over a simple barter deal that had went wrong. Marlow arrives in Brussels to sign up for his captaincy with King Leopold II as Conrad had done in 1890. He leaves onboard a passenger steamer to the West African coast noting the folly of men-of-war along the way shooting at the shore. If one wishes to hear a story of human bondage one need look no further than this.
Marlow’s first encounter with the Congo Free State reveals an indentured servitude system with native people in a state of moral and physical collapse. Kurtz is described as the overseer of an upcountry ivory trading station. When Marlow arrives at the central station his steamer has been sunk, probably due to some sort of local sabotage. The station manager inspires neither fear nor respect. Marlow speaks of their papier mache Mephistopheles as a false devil. The steamboat is wrecked and unreparable while he waits for weeks due to a lack of rivets. Europeans trod the land on the backs of African donkeys. Aside from their rapacious trading endeavors they see themselves on a mission to enlighten benighted denizens of the forest.
Steaming upriver while watching for stone beds and tree trunks Marlow keeps an eye out for deadwood to feed the boat’s furnace. Time to collect some ivory and rubber for the King of Belgium. On board were a crew of cannibals: “fine fellows in their place, and after all they didn’t eat each other before my face”. When Marlow’s African ship steerman is murdered by a tribe of onshore archers the passengers and crew members are offended by the unceremonial disposal of his remains. Kurtz appears prematurely as a phantom inside of Marlow’s mind. He is about to be met and has evolved into an indigenous king, gathering a clan of African and European fealties. His station has been decorated by human heads upon poles.
Marlow encounters a ragged young captain on the edge of the Kurtz compound who is entranced by the enigmatic man. Kurtz is compared to an idol whose ravenous appetites are irresistible and charismatic to those he’s assembled around him, but is ill and needs to be carried on a litter. Although prolific in his harvesting of ivory he has stirred up troubles in the region and had ordered the attack on Marlow’s ship. From the forest comes an ominous beating of drums and bonfires blazing in the darkness. He pursues Kurtz onshore through the grass and bush while encountering an antelope horned witch doctor along the way. It is a terrifying vision of a late Victorian African colony written in a powerful prose with a shocking ending.
“We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell.”
“We were wanderers on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling under the droop of heavy foliage. The steamer toiled on the edge of an incomprehensible frenzy. Were the prehistoric men cursing us, praying to us or welcoming us - who could tell?”
“It was as though a veil had been rent. I saw on that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power, of craven terror, of an intense and hopeless despair. Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, a cry that was no more than a breath - The horror! The horror!”
“I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. Their bearing was offensive to me like outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend.”
“The tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombrely under an overcast sky and seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.”
*************
Imagine this: you are a native Polish speaker and write one of the most influential novels in the English language, replete with references to ancient and modern history while being a sea captain to far flung parts of the globe. Well, that is what Joseph Conrad did in this 1899 novella. ‘Heart of Darkness’ was adapted into the Francis Ford Coppola film ‘Apocalypse Now’ in 1979. I rarely do this but I recommend getting the Oxford World Classics edition of the book for its frequent and in depth footnotes. Without these it is likely that many of the allusions would have flown over my head. Being of such an age the text is in the public domain and would also surely suffice. There is something in this tale that exudes a legend.
The story starts out with the captain Marlow expounding on his previous voyages in the far east and his desire to steam up the Congo, while he sits on the River Thames awaiting the tide to go out. Very quickly it is understood that Marlow is in fact Conrad by clues he left in the text, while plying a steamboat up the river. A prior captain had been murdered by locals over a simple barter deal that had went wrong. Marlow arrives in Brussels to sign up for his captaincy with King Leopold II as Conrad had done in 1890. He leaves onboard a passenger steamer to the West African coast noting the folly of men-of-war along the way shooting at the shore. If one wishes to hear a story of human bondage one need look no further than this.
Marlow’s first encounter with the Congo Free State reveals an indentured servitude system with native people in a state of moral and physical collapse. Kurtz is described as the overseer of an upcountry ivory trading station. When Marlow arrives at the central station his steamer has been sunk, probably due to some sort of local sabotage. The station manager inspires neither fear nor respect. Marlow speaks of their papier mache Mephistopheles as a false devil. The steamboat is wrecked and unreparable while he waits for weeks due to a lack of rivets. Europeans trod the land on the backs of African donkeys. Aside from their rapacious trading endeavors they see themselves on a mission to enlighten benighted denizens of the forest.
Steaming upriver while watching for stone beds and tree trunks Marlow keeps an eye out for deadwood to feed the boat’s furnace. Time to collect some ivory and rubber for the King of Belgium. On board were a crew of cannibals: “fine fellows in their place, and after all they didn’t eat each other before my face”. When Marlow’s African ship steerman is murdered by a tribe of onshore archers the passengers and crew members are offended by the unceremonial disposal of his remains. Kurtz appears prematurely as a phantom inside of Marlow’s mind. He is about to be met and has evolved into an indigenous king, gathering a clan of African and European fealties. His station has been decorated by human heads upon poles.
Marlow encounters a ragged young captain on the edge of the Kurtz compound who is entranced by the enigmatic man. Kurtz is compared to an idol whose ravenous appetites are irresistible and charismatic to those he’s assembled around him, but is ill and needs to be carried on a litter. Although prolific in his harvesting of ivory he has stirred up troubles in the region and had ordered the attack on Marlow’s ship. From the forest comes an ominous beating of drums and bonfires blazing in the darkness. He pursues Kurtz onshore through the grass and bush while encountering an antelope horned witch doctor along the way. It is a terrifying vision of a late Victorian African colony written in a powerful prose with a shocking ending.
January 12, 2016
"The horror! The horror!"
— Heart of Darkness
Have you ever tried any meditation technique? Well, just last year I began to make some research about it. What I found was truly compelling, so I decided to try some of the exercises I read about, which I still practice sometimes on my spare time. There's a great gamma of those techniques and regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs, all of them have one and only purpose: to help he who puts them to practice. Personally, they helped me cope with some issues, such as anxiety and insomnia; but, truth be told, there are some things — intrinsic, I've come to think — that seem to cling to the deepest regions of my being — dark things, perhaps. I'm no expert on the subject — in fact, I hesitated about bringing it up — but from what I've learned, all these techniques basically help you with introspective issues by tracking their source. In this inner and spiritual journey you may find virtue but you may also find what Conrad chose as the title for this tale: a heart of darkness.
Either the title means the core of an unknown region or a symbolism for a corrupted human's soul and mind, it provides the reader with a general idea of what he's about to encounter. For me, it seemed at first like a simple story about colonialism written in a plain narrative. The error! The error! Conrad is truly a master of prose and he's often regarded as a venturer in the modernist wave. It may be true, if we think of such a literary movement as something related to Proust or Woolf or Joyce, who wrote their masterpieces based on a fluent stream of consciousness that emerges from a simple object or idea. Thus Conrad introduces the reader to Marlow who relates a story of his days of youth to his mates — a story which is basically the whole tale. Furthermore, just like the modernists aforementioned, Marlow's descriptions of the scenarios, his thoughts and reactions to the events that shape the plot are very insightful; the author's label, nevertheless, rests in the sombre yet alluring way in which all of this is written. The outcome: a skilful, contrasting blend of a portrayal of the exotic external and the shadowy internal. (And I've come to think the sun and the shadows play an important symbolism in this tale.)
"… No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life–sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence — that which makes its truth, its meaning — its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream — alone… ."
— Heart of Darkness
Overall, Marlow's anecdote is about him joining, out of his aunt's influences, an ivory trading company in Africa and the dark affairs that occurred to him therein. So from the moment the whole process begins with Marlow being examined by a doctor and the latter asks him 'Ever any madness in your family?', you get involved in an increasing tension and suspense that won't decrease until the ambiguos climax of the story which is marked my the famous words 'The horror! The horror!' And even afterwards, in Marlow's last meeting, there's something melancholy yet gloomy and uneasy about it.
"Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself—that comes too late—a crop of unextinguishable regrets."
— Heart of Darkness
Most of the psychological thrill in the story is aroused because of the second main character: a certain, enigmatic Kurtz. From the moment he arrives, Marlow's told about this personage's grandeur and his sound methods, to the extent that all the hubbub about him makes Marlow form an a priori image of him so that Kurtz goes from a name, to an image, to a place (that is the station where he dwelled), to an ideal, and lastly, to the personification of the man behind all of it.
Some may not be fond of Conrad's way of portraying all of this, specially when Marlow's, and actually all white characters' ways are somewhat tinted with white supremacy. However, as the story moves forward, and specially when Kurtz finally enters the scene, the writer's viewpoints become clearer. In my opinion, Kurtz fall is a fascinating depiction of what would happen — nay, what happens, for this did happen to Conrad himself — what happens when Man loses what he knows as civility, clearing the way for his most concealed passions and all those feelings he casts away out of social norms. For some, this timeout of sorts, this chance to be away from their routines and get to know a new culture, it could be a chance for introspection, to focus on one's mind, like it is done while meditating. However, Kurtz reaches his blackest shade: his heart of darkness. Thus he begins to gain power amongst the natives, but as this happens his greed grows too, so he begins to abuse of his authority towards them, who now see him as some kind of deity.
"Better his cry—much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!"
— Heart of Darkness.
Lastly, when Marlow returns to civilisation, everything seems to him so dull compared with the passion, the rage and perhaps the freedom he witnessed in Africa, which helped me understand Conrad's stand towards colonialism, civilisation, and most importantly, humanity.
"I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence, because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew."
— Heart of Darkness
The copy I read also includes three more tales: An Outpost of Progress, Karain: A Memory and Youth: A Narrative. They were a superb introduction but I don't think any of them was as magnificent as Heart of Darkness, in spite of their own greatness. They have many points in common, specially Youth, and all of them are written flawlessly and the feeling of uneasiness and horror(!) is well preserved, but Heart of Darkness was certainly the grand finale for this book, and, hands down, one of the best tales I've ever read.
"A man may destroy everything within himself, love and hate an belief, and even doubt; but as long as he clings to life, he cannot destroy fear: the fear, subtle, indestructible, and terrible, that pervades his being; that tinges his thoughts; that lurks in his heart; that watches on his lips the struggle of his last breath."
— An Outpost of Progress
May 30, 2019
Il titolo è ingannevole. Il mare è uno dei.protagonisti indiscussi, ma ancor di più lo sono i personaggi e la maestria che Conrad mostra non solo nell'analizzare le profonde oscurità della loro anima tormentata, ma anche il senso d'esclusione che molti di loro avvertono e che, forse, riflette i sentimenti del Konrad polacco naturalizzato inglese. Una piacevolissima scoperta. Consiglio la lettura. Domani, Il ritorno e Amy Forster sono i racconti che ho amato di più.
May 18, 2018
A 3.75 star novella.
I've read this fairly short novel praised on its back cover in the Oxford World's Classics as "The finest of all Conrad's tales," some three or four years ago and found it a bit tough. This novel's not easy to understand since Marlow, the chief character, enmeshed by the mystery and menace along his dangerous journey up the Congo River to relieve the formidable Mr Kurtz finally made his encounter with him. However, I found it enjoyable and kept reading it till the end.
I know he's long been regarded as one of the great English authors but his writing style is still impeccable, unique till, I think, few native speakers can match him. One of the reasons is that he wrote numerous English classics worth reading seriously (provided that, of course, you have time, endurance and admiration) and, famously, he has written his works in English as his third language!
I've read this fairly short novel praised on its back cover in the Oxford World's Classics as "The finest of all Conrad's tales," some three or four years ago and found it a bit tough. This novel's not easy to understand since Marlow, the chief character, enmeshed by the mystery and menace along his dangerous journey up the Congo River to relieve the formidable Mr Kurtz finally made his encounter with him. However, I found it enjoyable and kept reading it till the end.
I know he's long been regarded as one of the great English authors but his writing style is still impeccable, unique till, I think, few native speakers can match him. One of the reasons is that he wrote numerous English classics worth reading seriously (provided that, of course, you have time, endurance and admiration) and, famously, he has written his works in English as his third language!
July 21, 2020
Esta edición en particular contiene dos relatos adicionales a El corazón de las tinieblas. El primero "Juventud", tiene como protagonista a Christopher Marlowe, el mismo de la novela que da título al libro. El tercero titulado en la presente edición como: "En las últimas", aunque su título también ha sido traducido como "La soga al cuello" o "Cabo de cuerda".
En el prólogo se aclara que se tomó la decisión editorial de publicarlos juntos, pues originalmente así fueron publicados por Conrad. Desde su publicación, varios lectores y críticos literarios se han empeñado en ver estos relatos como una representación de tres de las etapas en la vida de un hombre: juventud, madurez y vejez. Aunque Conrad negaba que compartieran algo más que el haber sido escritos en la misma etapa de su vida.
Los relatos están bien escritos y son interesantes. Aunque quizá sea el estilo del autor de escribir párrafos muy largos, que se me complicó bastante, tanto que por momentos sentía que no lo terminaba. Pero esa no era una opción para mí.
Pues hace un año lo propusieron en un Club de lectura y por estar tomando mi seminario de titulación, tuve que dejarlo inconcluso, pues solo leí "Juventud" y la novela que da título al libro.
Desde entonces ese "pendiente por retomar y concluir" me estuvo "haciendo ruido" y ahora aprovechando el encierro decidí concluirlo, aunque fue...🤦🏻♀️
Ahora me doy cuenta que el Seminario solo fue un pretexto, pues si no lo termine es porque leerlo se me hizo cuesta arriba... aunque valió la pena, ¡otro libro que borró de mi lista de pendientes!
No le doy cuatro estrellas, por lo pesada que me resultó su lectura, aunque quizá las merece. Quisiera darle solo dos estrellas, aunque temo pecar de subjetiva. Así que lo dejo en 3.0 ni una centésima más ni una menos...
En el prólogo se aclara que se tomó la decisión editorial de publicarlos juntos, pues originalmente así fueron publicados por Conrad. Desde su publicación, varios lectores y críticos literarios se han empeñado en ver estos relatos como una representación de tres de las etapas en la vida de un hombre: juventud, madurez y vejez. Aunque Conrad negaba que compartieran algo más que el haber sido escritos en la misma etapa de su vida.
Los relatos están bien escritos y son interesantes. Aunque quizá sea el estilo del autor de escribir párrafos muy largos, que se me complicó bastante, tanto que por momentos sentía que no lo terminaba. Pero esa no era una opción para mí.
Pues hace un año lo propusieron en un Club de lectura y por estar tomando mi seminario de titulación, tuve que dejarlo inconcluso, pues solo leí "Juventud" y la novela que da título al libro.
Desde entonces ese "pendiente por retomar y concluir" me estuvo "haciendo ruido" y ahora aprovechando el encierro decidí concluirlo, aunque fue...🤦🏻♀️
Ahora me doy cuenta que el Seminario solo fue un pretexto, pues si no lo termine es porque leerlo se me hizo cuesta arriba... aunque valió la pena, ¡otro libro que borró de mi lista de pendientes!
No le doy cuatro estrellas, por lo pesada que me resultó su lectura, aunque quizá las merece. Quisiera darle solo dos estrellas, aunque temo pecar de subjetiva. Así que lo dejo en 3.0 ni una centésima más ni una menos...
May 24, 2012
I think this was a little over my head, apparently Conrad spoke like a half-dozen languages so maybe I lost something in the translation because I only speak one and 1/4. I got the main themes of imperialism, racism, the thin line between civilization and barbarism, but as for any specific thing that was happening in the book while I was reading, I'm really at a loss for. I did like "Apocalypse Now" though, for what it's worth.
November 18, 2016
I've previously reviewed "Heart of Darkness" and I agree with Chinua Achebe's opinion that "Darkness" is a work of racism even given the time in which it was written.
"Youth" was a much more enjoyable work and I can't improve upon the afterword's description of this work as one of Conrad's "feat of memory", in which youth, fantasies, and dreams disappear in a matter of seconds.
"The End of the Tether" is in a way like the travel of the ship in "Darkness" but here we encounter new civilizations on the banks of the river: tobacco plantations, entertainments, but Masters treating their workers like slaves. Still, it is madness we encounter, again, as the ship is deliberately shipwrecked when the ship owner simply gives up on life.
Neither "Youth" or "Tether" contain the racism of "Darkness", but neither are they strong enough to lift this volume to a three star rating.
About Conrad, I know from the jacket blurb that Conrad attempted suicide then joined the British navy for a few years before retiring to write. Was there a streak of madness within Conrad his entire life? I want to know more about Conrad, and am going to read at least one more book by this author.
"Youth" was a much more enjoyable work and I can't improve upon the afterword's description of this work as one of Conrad's "feat of memory", in which youth, fantasies, and dreams disappear in a matter of seconds.
"The End of the Tether" is in a way like the travel of the ship in "Darkness" but here we encounter new civilizations on the banks of the river: tobacco plantations, entertainments, but Masters treating their workers like slaves. Still, it is madness we encounter, again, as the ship is deliberately shipwrecked when the ship owner simply gives up on life.
Neither "Youth" or "Tether" contain the racism of "Darkness", but neither are they strong enough to lift this volume to a three star rating.
About Conrad, I know from the jacket blurb that Conrad attempted suicide then joined the British navy for a few years before retiring to write. Was there a streak of madness within Conrad his entire life? I want to know more about Conrad, and am going to read at least one more book by this author.
December 12, 2008
While I know and can appreciate that this book is considered a classic by many, it's not my cup of tea. I'm a guy who likes good, solid fiction, based on physical principles. HEART OF DARKNESS is the opposite: metaphysical, spiritual and dwelling on concepts and themes rather than a more reality-based narrative.
At its worst, this is a string of metaphors and imagery, linked by a light plot that doesn't go very far. Conrad visited the locales he writes about, and there is certainly local flavour here. I loved the classic line "The horror, the horror!" and the circumstances surrounding it, and it was a pleasure to find the book was so short.
But this isn't what I like to read, and the book had the effect of making me not want to try any more of Conrad's work.
At its worst, this is a string of metaphors and imagery, linked by a light plot that doesn't go very far. Conrad visited the locales he writes about, and there is certainly local flavour here. I loved the classic line "The horror, the horror!" and the circumstances surrounding it, and it was a pleasure to find the book was so short.
But this isn't what I like to read, and the book had the effect of making me not want to try any more of Conrad's work.
February 7, 2017
I came across this handsome hardcover published by the Folio Society early last month at the DASA BookCafe in Bangkok and got it to read the remaining two stories excluding ‘Heart of Darkness’; the stories being ‘Youth’ and ‘The End of the Tether’ in which the first I browsed a few pages years ago and the latter I recalled its title vaguely. Indeed, this trilogy-like book should have been entitled, ‘Youth and Two Other Stories’ but, understandably, its title has appeared as such due to the second title’s highly-controversial analyses and famously-critical debate among Conrad scholars, professors and critics etc. since its first publication in 1902 by Blackwood under the title ‘Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories’.
Moreover, before reading this book there is a point to keep in mind since in his Note Conrad has notified, “The three stories in this volume lay no claim to unity of artistic purpose. The only bond between them is that of the time in which they were written.” (p. 23) As his readers, we can’t help being grateful for his summaries, a letter extract in Jeremy Harding’s superb Introduction that we should primarily read as an essential overview:
One and two are told in the first person by Marlow … One, the story of a ship on fire at sea. Two happens in the Belgian Congo: a wild story of a journalist who becomes manager of a station in the interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages. Thus described, the subject seems comic, but it isn’t. Three, written in the third person, is rather sentimental. It is about an old captain. (p. 9)
Reading such a 32-page ‘Youth’ is, I think, relatively enjoyable due to his unique narration and more understanding supported by reading its synopsis at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_(.... I was especially touched by his mentions of ‘Bangkok’ in various paragraphs/lines, for instance:
‘We left London in ballast – sand ballast – to load a cargo of coal in a northern port for Bangkok. Bangkok! I thrilled. I had been six years at sea, but had only seen Melbourne and Sydney, very good places, charming places in their way – but Bangkok!
… (p. 31)
‘ … This was done, the repairs finished, cargo reshipped; a new crew came on board, and we went out – for Bangkok. At the end of a week we were back again. The crew said they weren’t going to Bangkok – a hundred and fifty days’ passage – in a something hooker that wanted pumping eight hours out of the twenty-four; and the nautical papers inserted again the little paragraph: “Judea. Barque. Tyne to Bangkok; coals; put back to Falmouth leaky and with crew refusing duty.”
‘There were more delays – more tinkering. … I loved the ship more than ever, and wanted awfully to get to Bangkok. To Bangkok! Magic name, blessed name. Mesopotamia wasn’t a patch on it. Remember I was twenty, and it was my first second-mate’s billet, and the East was waiting for me.
… (p. 38)
One of the reasons is that, as far as I’ve known from reading somewhere, Conrad enjoyed visiting Bangkok (How often? I have no information) and usually stayed at the famous , one of the first founded hotels in Siam then, the Oriental Hotel, eventually, its administrative committee have named a Conrad room as a fond memorial honor to his stays there.
I’d like to say something notably interesting on his technique in his ‘Youth’ before ‘The End of the Tether’ that deals with a command mentioned five times uttered once in a while from Marlow’s relatively lengthy narratives, that is, ‘Pass the bottle.’ (pp. 34, 36, 39, 43, 45) which, presumably, suggests apt intermissions and the narrator himself needs something strong to keep him going and staying focused on the story.
As for 'The End of the Tether', it's a bit disappointed because its synopsis isn't available on the above-mentioned Wikipedia web page; indeed, it should be of great help especially to Conrad newcomers to better understand its characters, climax, setting, and so on worth reflecting and discussing for new ideas or inspiration. It's probably formidable at first sight from its length covering 14 chapters, 138+pages so it should be better if its readers are informed for well-prepared reading instead of plunging into the mystery itself and, predictably, don't enjoy reading Conrad.
In sum, reading these three stories would give more light on their purpose of writing from Conrad himself since its first three-in-one publication in 1902, more than a century ago, which is quite a long life-span. Undoubtedly, "Heart of Darkness" has since been more famous than its two counterparts and still read by Conrad admirers.
Endnote: I have just found this article by David Miller inspiringly informative: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/bo...
Moreover, before reading this book there is a point to keep in mind since in his Note Conrad has notified, “The three stories in this volume lay no claim to unity of artistic purpose. The only bond between them is that of the time in which they were written.” (p. 23) As his readers, we can’t help being grateful for his summaries, a letter extract in Jeremy Harding’s superb Introduction that we should primarily read as an essential overview:
One and two are told in the first person by Marlow … One, the story of a ship on fire at sea. Two happens in the Belgian Congo: a wild story of a journalist who becomes manager of a station in the interior and makes himself worshipped by a tribe of savages. Thus described, the subject seems comic, but it isn’t. Three, written in the third person, is rather sentimental. It is about an old captain. (p. 9)
Reading such a 32-page ‘Youth’ is, I think, relatively enjoyable due to his unique narration and more understanding supported by reading its synopsis at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_(.... I was especially touched by his mentions of ‘Bangkok’ in various paragraphs/lines, for instance:
‘We left London in ballast – sand ballast – to load a cargo of coal in a northern port for Bangkok. Bangkok! I thrilled. I had been six years at sea, but had only seen Melbourne and Sydney, very good places, charming places in their way – but Bangkok!
… (p. 31)
‘ … This was done, the repairs finished, cargo reshipped; a new crew came on board, and we went out – for Bangkok. At the end of a week we were back again. The crew said they weren’t going to Bangkok – a hundred and fifty days’ passage – in a something hooker that wanted pumping eight hours out of the twenty-four; and the nautical papers inserted again the little paragraph: “Judea. Barque. Tyne to Bangkok; coals; put back to Falmouth leaky and with crew refusing duty.”
‘There were more delays – more tinkering. … I loved the ship more than ever, and wanted awfully to get to Bangkok. To Bangkok! Magic name, blessed name. Mesopotamia wasn’t a patch on it. Remember I was twenty, and it was my first second-mate’s billet, and the East was waiting for me.
… (p. 38)
One of the reasons is that, as far as I’ve known from reading somewhere, Conrad enjoyed visiting Bangkok (How often? I have no information) and usually stayed at the famous , one of the first founded hotels in Siam then, the Oriental Hotel, eventually, its administrative committee have named a Conrad room as a fond memorial honor to his stays there.
I’d like to say something notably interesting on his technique in his ‘Youth’ before ‘The End of the Tether’ that deals with a command mentioned five times uttered once in a while from Marlow’s relatively lengthy narratives, that is, ‘Pass the bottle.’ (pp. 34, 36, 39, 43, 45) which, presumably, suggests apt intermissions and the narrator himself needs something strong to keep him going and staying focused on the story.
As for 'The End of the Tether', it's a bit disappointed because its synopsis isn't available on the above-mentioned Wikipedia web page; indeed, it should be of great help especially to Conrad newcomers to better understand its characters, climax, setting, and so on worth reflecting and discussing for new ideas or inspiration. It's probably formidable at first sight from its length covering 14 chapters, 138+pages so it should be better if its readers are informed for well-prepared reading instead of plunging into the mystery itself and, predictably, don't enjoy reading Conrad.
In sum, reading these three stories would give more light on their purpose of writing from Conrad himself since its first three-in-one publication in 1902, more than a century ago, which is quite a long life-span. Undoubtedly, "Heart of Darkness" has since been more famous than its two counterparts and still read by Conrad admirers.
Endnote: I have just found this article by David Miller inspiringly informative: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/bo...
December 12, 2007
What a thick little book. I have to say when I first started reading this book back in my freshman year of high school, I hated this book and was quickly bored with it after ten pages. I put it down and gave up on it. Part of the reasn is because I read the short story in front of it and that WAS indeed mind-numbingly boring so I didn't expect anything different from Heart of Darkness.
Now five years have passed and I really enjoy this book. It's just as dense as I remember it, but I definitely appreciate the book more this time for its atmosphere of boiling insanity. I also have to admit that if it weren't for Apocalypse Now I probably wouldn't have given this book another chance.
This is a very rewarding book and isn't for everyone, but, hell, I loved it. I think it's just an acquired taste.
My only complaint with this book is that I don't think Conrad did too much of a good job of explaining, completely, why Marlow looed up at Kurtz like he did. I understand he was fascinated by his insanity and his eloquence with the English language, but I feel there sould have been more. We should have been fascinated by this enigmatic man as well, but I wasn't.
Oh, well, just one flaw in a very good book.
Now five years have passed and I really enjoy this book. It's just as dense as I remember it, but I definitely appreciate the book more this time for its atmosphere of boiling insanity. I also have to admit that if it weren't for Apocalypse Now I probably wouldn't have given this book another chance.
This is a very rewarding book and isn't for everyone, but, hell, I loved it. I think it's just an acquired taste.
My only complaint with this book is that I don't think Conrad did too much of a good job of explaining, completely, why Marlow looed up at Kurtz like he did. I understand he was fascinated by his insanity and his eloquence with the English language, but I feel there sould have been more. We should have been fascinated by this enigmatic man as well, but I wasn't.
Oh, well, just one flaw in a very good book.
March 6, 2020
Fever dream...
One night a group of friends are aboard a boat on the Thames waiting for the tide before they can set sail. As darkness grows around them, one of the men, Marlow, tells the story of the time he worked as a pilot on a steamboat on the Congo and of the rogue ivory trader, Kurtz, whom he met there.
I realise I’m white and descended from colonialist stock, so I recognise that my judgement may not be as objective as I would like, but it astonishes me that Conrad has, among some critics, a reputation as a racist. This book is an excoriating study of the horrors of colonialism in Africa – horrors perpetrated in this case by Belgium, but Conrad leaves that deliberately vague so I think we can assume he is speaking generally as well as specifically. Conrad shows the devastating impact the white man had on both the society and the land of Africa, but he also shows that this devastation turns back on the coloniser, corrupting him physically and psychologically, and by extension, corrupting the societies from which he comes.
Millions of words have been written in analysis of the text by people considerably more qualified (and even more opinionated) than I, so rather than try to argue the case for or against the book on a moral level, I’ll stick to how I feel it works as a novella. And on that score, my feelings are somewhat mixed.
Having now read it twice, I have to say I find it quite hard to read, not because of the horrors but because the writing, although superbly descriptive, often darkly lyrical and with some wonderfully disturbing imagery, is sometimes convoluted and rather unclear. The introduction and excellent notes in my Oxford World’s Classics edition suggest that often Conrad was being deliberately vague – as I mentioned earlier about Belgium, for instance – and I’m sure people at the time would have known enough about their world to be able to fill in the blanks. But frankly, I think I’d have struggled without the notes. Marlow also jumps forward from time to time, leaving linking bits of the story unsaid, perhaps realistically in terms of how we think and relate stories verbally, but I found it rather jarring in written form. As a lazy reader, I was irritated that several times I felt I had to go back and read a section again to fully catch the meaning and how we’d got from there to here, so to speak.
However, the book’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. The overall effect is of a hallucination or a nightmare, full of imagery about darkness. Marlow tells us that he is feverish for at least part of the journey and on his return to civilisation, and there is a sense of it all being a fever dream. Everything feels exaggerated, from the descriptions of the impenetrable jungle, to the Africans’ worship of Kurtz as a kind of god, to the attitudes of the white men to Kurtz’ apparent power over them. We are told repeatedly of Kurtz’ eloquence, but are never permitted to hear his views in his own voice. On the very rare occasions that he speaks on the page, his words are unexceptional (apart from on one occasion which I won’t go into because it’s a major spoiler, and becomes the climactic point of the book). Did Conrad choose to do that because he felt perhaps that he couldn’t make him eloquent enough to live up to his reputation? I doubt it, since Conrad can write supremely eloquently. So was it perhaps to leave the reader in doubt as to whether Kurtz was truly eloquent, or whether his listeners exaggerated his eloquence to justify their cult-like admiration for him? I don’t know, but I found it intriguing to consider. (We undoubtedly have leaders today that no-one could seriously describe as eloquent, but who inspire crazed uncritical devotion in their followers.)
The one thing that doesn’t have a feeling of unreality is the physical cruelty of the white men’s treatment of the African workers in the stations along the river, and interestingly these are the sections that Conrad writes in the most straightforward manner. The cruelty didn’t surprise me too much (though it horrified me), but what I did find odd was the feeling of almost total incompetence and futility of the white man’s ventures. I don’t know enough about the Belgian attitude to their colonies, but again the introduction tells me that they had a particularly bad reputation at that time even among fellow colonial powers. Unlike in colonial literature by and about the Brits in Africa (and even in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart), there is no suggestion of the white man attempting to bring “civilisation” to the “savages”, or religion. I suspect this is deliberate, since Conrad seems to be comparing the two cultures and suggesting that, while they are different, one is not intrinsically superior to the other – they are simply at different stages of development. One of the most intriguing things he does is frequently to compare the white man in Africa to what it must have been like for a “civilised” Roman sent to pacify and exploit savage Britons back in the days of their Empire. Unspoken, this reminds the reader that all empires fall in time, but also that all empires leave a legacy on those they colonised, for good or ill, or both.
I’m glad to have read it, especially for the wonderful descriptive prose and the feverish imagery, and it certainly deserves its status as a major classic of colonial literature – hence the 5-star rating. However, though still a newcomer to Conrad’s work, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as some of his other stories – Karain, for example, or Lord Jim, probably because I found them easier to read. I wondered why it’s the one that seems always to be connected to his name, and I can only conclude that it’s the vagueness itself, which allows critics and academics to argue endlessly over meanings and moral values, and leaves space for later writers and film-makers to reinterpret it as they choose. This reader, however, would have preferred just a little more plain speaking and a little less need to rely on the notes...
* * * * *
I thoroughly enjoyed the other three stories in the volume too:
An Outpost of Progress – Two men, Kayerts and Carlier, are dropped off to run a Company trading post in the Belgian Congo. They are basically incompetent, relying on their black agent and workers to do the work of trading for the precious ivory for which they are there. However, events spiral out of their control and they are left running low on resources and increasingly scared of the, to them, incomprehensible and savage people in this wild land. And then the boat that was due to relieve them is delayed…
This starts off with a good deal of humour, full of irony and sarcasm as Conrad turns the prevailing ideas about the superiority of the white man on their head. We see how quickly the veneer of “civilisation” falls away when men are isolated in a vastly different culture they don’t understand. Gradually the story darkens, until it reaches a powerfully dark and dramatic ending of true horror. The writing is wonderful, full of lush descriptions that create an ominously threatening environment, with enough vagueness so that we, like the characters, fear what may be lurking just outside. And his depiction of the downward spiral of his characters into moral weakness and eventual terror is done brilliantly. A great story.
Youth: A Narrative – This tells of Marlow, who will appear again in Heart of Darkness, as a twenty-year-old in his first voyage as second mate on an ill-fated sea trip in the rickety old ship Judea. A series of disasters leads to the ship constantly having to return to port for repairs, and things don’t improve once they finally get off on their journey. It’s quite funny and is apparently a fairly accurate record of Conrad’s own voyage as a young man aboard the equally doomed Palestine. It’s about the vigour and optimism of youth – how even disasters can seem like exciting adventures before age and experience make us jaded and fearful. It’s enjoyable, but a little too long for its content, and with nothing like the depth of the other stories in the collection.
Karain: A Memory – The narrator is one of three adventurers, smuggling arms into the Malay Archipelago. They come to know Karain, the headman of a small land which he and his followers have invaded and occupied. Karain is a haunted man, perhaps literally, perhaps superstitiously. He turns to his white friends for protection…
The story in this one, although good, is somewhat secondary to the wonderfully descriptive and insightful writing. The prose in the first two or three pages is sublime, as Conrad swiftly creates a place, a country, a man and a people, all with a level of lyricism and mysticism that places the reader there, already unsettled before the tale begins. Conrad shows how colonialism disrupts and corrupts long-held traditions and ways of life, but how old beliefs nonetheless endure. And lest the reader should wish to mock the superstitions of the natives, Conrad forestalls this by reminding us with brutal irony that many of our own cherished traditions and beliefs arise out of superstition too. He also shows that, when white and black meet not as master and slave but in a kind of equality, the possibility for friendship exists, even when their cultures are so different. I loved this story.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Oxford World’s Classics.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
One night a group of friends are aboard a boat on the Thames waiting for the tide before they can set sail. As darkness grows around them, one of the men, Marlow, tells the story of the time he worked as a pilot on a steamboat on the Congo and of the rogue ivory trader, Kurtz, whom he met there.
I realise I’m white and descended from colonialist stock, so I recognise that my judgement may not be as objective as I would like, but it astonishes me that Conrad has, among some critics, a reputation as a racist. This book is an excoriating study of the horrors of colonialism in Africa – horrors perpetrated in this case by Belgium, but Conrad leaves that deliberately vague so I think we can assume he is speaking generally as well as specifically. Conrad shows the devastating impact the white man had on both the society and the land of Africa, but he also shows that this devastation turns back on the coloniser, corrupting him physically and psychologically, and by extension, corrupting the societies from which he comes.
Millions of words have been written in analysis of the text by people considerably more qualified (and even more opinionated) than I, so rather than try to argue the case for or against the book on a moral level, I’ll stick to how I feel it works as a novella. And on that score, my feelings are somewhat mixed.
Having now read it twice, I have to say I find it quite hard to read, not because of the horrors but because the writing, although superbly descriptive, often darkly lyrical and with some wonderfully disturbing imagery, is sometimes convoluted and rather unclear. The introduction and excellent notes in my Oxford World’s Classics edition suggest that often Conrad was being deliberately vague – as I mentioned earlier about Belgium, for instance – and I’m sure people at the time would have known enough about their world to be able to fill in the blanks. But frankly, I think I’d have struggled without the notes. Marlow also jumps forward from time to time, leaving linking bits of the story unsaid, perhaps realistically in terms of how we think and relate stories verbally, but I found it rather jarring in written form. As a lazy reader, I was irritated that several times I felt I had to go back and read a section again to fully catch the meaning and how we’d got from there to here, so to speak.
However, the book’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. The overall effect is of a hallucination or a nightmare, full of imagery about darkness. Marlow tells us that he is feverish for at least part of the journey and on his return to civilisation, and there is a sense of it all being a fever dream. Everything feels exaggerated, from the descriptions of the impenetrable jungle, to the Africans’ worship of Kurtz as a kind of god, to the attitudes of the white men to Kurtz’ apparent power over them. We are told repeatedly of Kurtz’ eloquence, but are never permitted to hear his views in his own voice. On the very rare occasions that he speaks on the page, his words are unexceptional (apart from on one occasion which I won’t go into because it’s a major spoiler, and becomes the climactic point of the book). Did Conrad choose to do that because he felt perhaps that he couldn’t make him eloquent enough to live up to his reputation? I doubt it, since Conrad can write supremely eloquently. So was it perhaps to leave the reader in doubt as to whether Kurtz was truly eloquent, or whether his listeners exaggerated his eloquence to justify their cult-like admiration for him? I don’t know, but I found it intriguing to consider. (We undoubtedly have leaders today that no-one could seriously describe as eloquent, but who inspire crazed uncritical devotion in their followers.)
The one thing that doesn’t have a feeling of unreality is the physical cruelty of the white men’s treatment of the African workers in the stations along the river, and interestingly these are the sections that Conrad writes in the most straightforward manner. The cruelty didn’t surprise me too much (though it horrified me), but what I did find odd was the feeling of almost total incompetence and futility of the white man’s ventures. I don’t know enough about the Belgian attitude to their colonies, but again the introduction tells me that they had a particularly bad reputation at that time even among fellow colonial powers. Unlike in colonial literature by and about the Brits in Africa (and even in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart), there is no suggestion of the white man attempting to bring “civilisation” to the “savages”, or religion. I suspect this is deliberate, since Conrad seems to be comparing the two cultures and suggesting that, while they are different, one is not intrinsically superior to the other – they are simply at different stages of development. One of the most intriguing things he does is frequently to compare the white man in Africa to what it must have been like for a “civilised” Roman sent to pacify and exploit savage Britons back in the days of their Empire. Unspoken, this reminds the reader that all empires fall in time, but also that all empires leave a legacy on those they colonised, for good or ill, or both.
I’m glad to have read it, especially for the wonderful descriptive prose and the feverish imagery, and it certainly deserves its status as a major classic of colonial literature – hence the 5-star rating. However, though still a newcomer to Conrad’s work, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as some of his other stories – Karain, for example, or Lord Jim, probably because I found them easier to read. I wondered why it’s the one that seems always to be connected to his name, and I can only conclude that it’s the vagueness itself, which allows critics and academics to argue endlessly over meanings and moral values, and leaves space for later writers and film-makers to reinterpret it as they choose. This reader, however, would have preferred just a little more plain speaking and a little less need to rely on the notes...
* * * * *
I thoroughly enjoyed the other three stories in the volume too:
An Outpost of Progress – Two men, Kayerts and Carlier, are dropped off to run a Company trading post in the Belgian Congo. They are basically incompetent, relying on their black agent and workers to do the work of trading for the precious ivory for which they are there. However, events spiral out of their control and they are left running low on resources and increasingly scared of the, to them, incomprehensible and savage people in this wild land. And then the boat that was due to relieve them is delayed…
This starts off with a good deal of humour, full of irony and sarcasm as Conrad turns the prevailing ideas about the superiority of the white man on their head. We see how quickly the veneer of “civilisation” falls away when men are isolated in a vastly different culture they don’t understand. Gradually the story darkens, until it reaches a powerfully dark and dramatic ending of true horror. The writing is wonderful, full of lush descriptions that create an ominously threatening environment, with enough vagueness so that we, like the characters, fear what may be lurking just outside. And his depiction of the downward spiral of his characters into moral weakness and eventual terror is done brilliantly. A great story.
Youth: A Narrative – This tells of Marlow, who will appear again in Heart of Darkness, as a twenty-year-old in his first voyage as second mate on an ill-fated sea trip in the rickety old ship Judea. A series of disasters leads to the ship constantly having to return to port for repairs, and things don’t improve once they finally get off on their journey. It’s quite funny and is apparently a fairly accurate record of Conrad’s own voyage as a young man aboard the equally doomed Palestine. It’s about the vigour and optimism of youth – how even disasters can seem like exciting adventures before age and experience make us jaded and fearful. It’s enjoyable, but a little too long for its content, and with nothing like the depth of the other stories in the collection.
Karain: A Memory – The narrator is one of three adventurers, smuggling arms into the Malay Archipelago. They come to know Karain, the headman of a small land which he and his followers have invaded and occupied. Karain is a haunted man, perhaps literally, perhaps superstitiously. He turns to his white friends for protection…
The story in this one, although good, is somewhat secondary to the wonderfully descriptive and insightful writing. The prose in the first two or three pages is sublime, as Conrad swiftly creates a place, a country, a man and a people, all with a level of lyricism and mysticism that places the reader there, already unsettled before the tale begins. Conrad shows how colonialism disrupts and corrupts long-held traditions and ways of life, but how old beliefs nonetheless endure. And lest the reader should wish to mock the superstitions of the natives, Conrad forestalls this by reminding us with brutal irony that many of our own cherished traditions and beliefs arise out of superstition too. He also shows that, when white and black meet not as master and slave but in a kind of equality, the possibility for friendship exists, even when their cultures are so different. I loved this story.
NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Oxford World’s Classics.
www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com
August 31, 2012
Nel 1924 Joseph Conrad, autore polacco, si spegneva in Bishopsbourne, un piccolo paese del Kent, in Inghilterra, suo paese d’adozione. Nello stesso anno Edwin Hubble, grazie al telescopio Hooker, riusciva a mettere a punto il sistema degli indicatori di distanza tra galassie. Ciò buttò le basi per teorizzare, grazie all’associazione tra la scala delle distanze cosmiche ed il redshift (il fenomeno di cambio di colore nello spettro della luce), la versione moderna della teoria del Big Bang, uno dei più intriganti misteri dell’Universo (se non il più grande). La teoria del Big Bang si è poi evoluta grazie ai contributi di eminenti scienziati tra cui Einstein, Friedman e Zwicky. E ci si è cominciati a chiedere come fosse l’Universo, quanto grande, che forma avesse e come evolvesse. Un guazzabuglio di materia, tempo ed energia che ha portato negli anni settanta alla teoria delle stringhe, la quale dava adito a pensare che ci potessero essere 10 elevato alla 500 universi possibili. Fino ad una delle più recenti teorie, la M-theory, che spiega che in realtà il nostro Universo è solo uno degli n possibili e che là fuori ne esisterebbero altri con leggi fisiche e dimensioni diverse dalle nostre. Ma tutte queste cose, per quanto incredibilmente affascinanti, sono solo dei modelli matematici, ancora lungi dall’essere dimostrate data la difficoltà dei riscontri.
Io sono nato nel 1979 e nel corrente anno 2012 ho letto le prime pagine di Conrad. Che mi hanno procurato un intenso piacere della lettura, nonché un profondo perturbamento dell’animo. Raramente uno scrittore aveva saputo mettere a nudo l’animo dei suoi personaggi così bene ed aveva funzionato da diapason, facendo vibrare il lettore (cioè il sottoscritto) all’unisono con essi. Raramente avevo trovato uno scrittore che riuscisse ad avere in sé tratti romantici, esistenzialisti, crepuscolari uniti ad una finissima critica della società moderna (ma anche di quella post-moderna). E raramente avevo trovato uno scrittore che per influenza fosse stato così tanto saccheggiato (letteratura, cinema, teatro) negli anni a venire, senza che io me ne rendessi conto.
Ora la domanda da porsi è: dove diavolo sono stato per 33 anni senza accorgermi degli scritti di Conrad e della loro influenza? Ebbene, dopo tanto rimuginare, sono arrivato all’unica spiegazione plausibile. In realtà io ero in un altro universo. Uno di quelli teorizzati, quelli con leggi fisiche e dimensioni differenti. E tra queste differenze sicuramente c’era quella che Conrad non esistesse e quindi io non ne potessi godere. Fino a che non ho compiuto un balzo nell’universo attuale qualche giorno fa (non chiedetemi come, ci sto ancora ragionando). Ecco, io vorrei andare dagli attuali fisici teorici e presentarmi a loro come la prova vivente che si, hanno ragione, esistono n universi, tutti diversi. Sono sicuro che di primo acchito sarebbero felicissimi e mi farebbero un sacco di domande a cui non saprei rispondere, visto che l’unica differenza che ricordo è appunto l’assenza delle opere di Conrad, così deludendoli. Invece a me basta, per esser contento, l'aver cambiato di universo.
Io sono nato nel 1979 e nel corrente anno 2012 ho letto le prime pagine di Conrad. Che mi hanno procurato un intenso piacere della lettura, nonché un profondo perturbamento dell’animo. Raramente uno scrittore aveva saputo mettere a nudo l’animo dei suoi personaggi così bene ed aveva funzionato da diapason, facendo vibrare il lettore (cioè il sottoscritto) all’unisono con essi. Raramente avevo trovato uno scrittore che riuscisse ad avere in sé tratti romantici, esistenzialisti, crepuscolari uniti ad una finissima critica della società moderna (ma anche di quella post-moderna). E raramente avevo trovato uno scrittore che per influenza fosse stato così tanto saccheggiato (letteratura, cinema, teatro) negli anni a venire, senza che io me ne rendessi conto.
Ora la domanda da porsi è: dove diavolo sono stato per 33 anni senza accorgermi degli scritti di Conrad e della loro influenza? Ebbene, dopo tanto rimuginare, sono arrivato all’unica spiegazione plausibile. In realtà io ero in un altro universo. Uno di quelli teorizzati, quelli con leggi fisiche e dimensioni differenti. E tra queste differenze sicuramente c’era quella che Conrad non esistesse e quindi io non ne potessi godere. Fino a che non ho compiuto un balzo nell’universo attuale qualche giorno fa (non chiedetemi come, ci sto ancora ragionando). Ecco, io vorrei andare dagli attuali fisici teorici e presentarmi a loro come la prova vivente che si, hanno ragione, esistono n universi, tutti diversi. Sono sicuro che di primo acchito sarebbero felicissimi e mi farebbero un sacco di domande a cui non saprei rispondere, visto che l’unica differenza che ricordo è appunto l’assenza delle opere di Conrad, così deludendoli. Invece a me basta, per esser contento, l'aver cambiato di universo.
January 15, 2012
This classic has been lounging around in my TBR pile forever. I picked it up over Christmas break, figuring I'd breeze through it in a day or so.
Nope.
It was like wading through wet cement.
The first story, "Youth", actually wasn't too bad. Story #2, "Heart of Darkness", was painful. The third one, "The End of the Tether" - man, I couldn't even finish. I struggled through over 1/2 and finally called it. Conrad's writing is so suffocating and so overblown it was difficult to get a solid grasp of the characters. While some of the themes (corruption and madness) were very clear, the writing got in the way of the actual storylines, and I probably missed the most important aspects. Yeah, this classic was completely wasted on me. I didn't have the patience or the interest. "The horror! The horror!" Whatever. One star.
Nope.
It was like wading through wet cement.
The first story, "Youth", actually wasn't too bad. Story #2, "Heart of Darkness", was painful. The third one, "The End of the Tether" - man, I couldn't even finish. I struggled through over 1/2 and finally called it. Conrad's writing is so suffocating and so overblown it was difficult to get a solid grasp of the characters. While some of the themes (corruption and madness) were very clear, the writing got in the way of the actual storylines, and I probably missed the most important aspects. Yeah, this classic was completely wasted on me. I didn't have the patience or the interest. "The horror! The horror!" Whatever. One star.
September 11, 2025
Normally I review books pretty rapidly after finishing them, but this one has waited 24 hours, because it feels like it needs a more considered and articulate review than I have time to give. To be honest, it's not just time: I don't want to start playing the 'intense thought about GR reviews' game, but then this is one where I do have some intense thoughts. The only solution? A scattered list of things, so that I have Some Thoughts but I don't have to craft them.
1. Conrad is an excellent prose stylist and the descriptions are fantastic.
2. I wish this had a better and more thoughtful introduction, that wasn't basically, "Why are you trying to cancel him, you woke monsters??? He wasn't as racist as those other writers!" I am flippantly paraphrasing and there is more to the introduction but it was a little thin.
3. Conrad was obviously a humane, intelligent man who was clearsighted about our common humanity and the thinness of civilisation.
4. It's interesting how 'not as racist as those other writers' opens him up to so much more criticism - it's the perennial problem that you can only really critique people who care (and I think Conrad would have cared, were he still alive). The fact that Marlow notices the insane awfulness of the Belgian Congo makes me want to yell at him about his complicity a lot more than if he was trolling around having An Adventure in Africa.
5. I think Achebe is broadly right about how racist Heart of Darkness is.
6. Youth is a delight, I really enjoyed it.
7. Conrad's life was so interesting, my god.
8. Heart of Darkness is so atmospheric and made my heart race. Again, excellent writer.
9. The stars are really for this edition rather than the works themselves. As always, rating classics is a bit pointless.
1. Conrad is an excellent prose stylist and the descriptions are fantastic.
2. I wish this had a better and more thoughtful introduction, that wasn't basically, "Why are you trying to cancel him, you woke monsters??? He wasn't as racist as those other writers!" I am flippantly paraphrasing and there is more to the introduction but it was a little thin.
3. Conrad was obviously a humane, intelligent man who was clearsighted about our common humanity and the thinness of civilisation.
4. It's interesting how 'not as racist as those other writers' opens him up to so much more criticism - it's the perennial problem that you can only really critique people who care (and I think Conrad would have cared, were he still alive). The fact that Marlow notices the insane awfulness of the Belgian Congo makes me want to yell at him about his complicity a lot more than if he was trolling around having An Adventure in Africa.
5. I think Achebe is broadly right about how racist Heart of Darkness is.
6. Youth is a delight, I really enjoyed it.
7. Conrad's life was so interesting, my god.
8. Heart of Darkness is so atmospheric and made my heart race. Again, excellent writer.
9. The stars are really for this edition rather than the works themselves. As always, rating classics is a bit pointless.
March 6, 2025
The first half of this edition includes “Other Tales” which are three short stories. There was only one of the stories that kept my interest: The Secret Sharer. The second half of this edition is dedicated to Heart of Darkness. I had a difficult time getting into the story. One of the things that bothered me is that the story is narrated, not to the reader but to other characters in the book which means that it is read in dialogue. The issue I had was there was dialogue within dialogue which made it confusing at times. The other thing that bothered me was that very few of the characters actually had names which also made it a bit confusing at times. I didn’t find it particularly that interesting until the climax which happens late in the story.
Read
December 27, 2019a literal nightmare... idk why our modernist professor made us read this
August 13, 2024
Reread in June 2024. I'm fairly certain I read Heart of Darkness once, maybe ten years ago. But having no memory of it, I vowed to return to it. Read in print and audio at the same time, which helped hold my attention.
I picked up a copy of these collected Conrad stories at an OUP employee book sale years back, and finally rereading HoD now, I appreciate it much more. HoD itself is only about 80 pages long, easily read in a day. Conveniently, I had just done some research on the Congo, having recently watched The Siege of Jadotville (which I would highly recommend). So I had some helpful context going in. The biggest strength is in the descriptions--read this for the ambiance, the aura, the themes. There's not much in the way of plot or character that's really going to grab you.
While I also liked "Youth," most of the other stories are forgettable (there's a reason HoD is the most well-known).
I sensed many parallels with Moby-Dick or, The Whale and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, though maybe that's only in my head.
If you want more depressing stories of African colonialism, see also Disgrace and Cry, the Beloved Country.
I picked up a copy of these collected Conrad stories at an OUP employee book sale years back, and finally rereading HoD now, I appreciate it much more. HoD itself is only about 80 pages long, easily read in a day. Conveniently, I had just done some research on the Congo, having recently watched The Siege of Jadotville (which I would highly recommend). So I had some helpful context going in. The biggest strength is in the descriptions--read this for the ambiance, the aura, the themes. There's not much in the way of plot or character that's really going to grab you.
While I also liked "Youth," most of the other stories are forgettable (there's a reason HoD is the most well-known).
I sensed many parallels with Moby-Dick or, The Whale and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, though maybe that's only in my head.
If you want more depressing stories of African colonialism, see also Disgrace and Cry, the Beloved Country.
April 27, 2015
{contains some spoilers}
This Wordsworth Classics compilation consists of three nautical themed tales. The first of which is the short story Youth. In Youth the middle-aged narrator, Charles Marlow, recounts his voyage as a young man aboard The Judea, a vessel carrying coal in the Far East. The voyage ends in disaster.
Also narrated by Marlow, Heart of Darkness is a novella about a steamship sailing up a river through the jungles of The Congo, in search of Mr Kurtz, a mysterious ivory trader, who has reportedly turned native. The terrain is unforgiving, the cannibalistic natives unpredictable, and the greed of the ivory-infatuated colonisers unremitting. Marlow, who becomes increasingly obsessed with Mr Kurtz, eventually finds him mortally ill, living in a house, surrounded by heads on pikes. Heart of Darkness is a deeply disturbing, thought-provoking, complex, multi-layered story, about what can occur when man exists outside of civilisation’s constraints.
In The End of the Tether, a maritime story set in South East Asia, the protagonist, Captain Whalley, is a widowed ship owner, who sells his vessel in order to raise money for his daughter. Whalley invests his last remaining money in the Sofala, an old steamer owned by its dishonest chief engineer, Massey. This is a story about deceit and the virtues and vices of man, a recurring theme for Conrad. The End of the Tether is a slow moving, but increasingly engrossing story that culminates in a surprising revelation.
Conrad utilises an ornate prose style to adeptly weave these challenging, atmospheric and insightful stories, which are concise by the standards of the period in which they were written.
This Wordsworth Classics compilation consists of three nautical themed tales. The first of which is the short story Youth. In Youth the middle-aged narrator, Charles Marlow, recounts his voyage as a young man aboard The Judea, a vessel carrying coal in the Far East. The voyage ends in disaster.
Also narrated by Marlow, Heart of Darkness is a novella about a steamship sailing up a river through the jungles of The Congo, in search of Mr Kurtz, a mysterious ivory trader, who has reportedly turned native. The terrain is unforgiving, the cannibalistic natives unpredictable, and the greed of the ivory-infatuated colonisers unremitting. Marlow, who becomes increasingly obsessed with Mr Kurtz, eventually finds him mortally ill, living in a house, surrounded by heads on pikes. Heart of Darkness is a deeply disturbing, thought-provoking, complex, multi-layered story, about what can occur when man exists outside of civilisation’s constraints.
In The End of the Tether, a maritime story set in South East Asia, the protagonist, Captain Whalley, is a widowed ship owner, who sells his vessel in order to raise money for his daughter. Whalley invests his last remaining money in the Sofala, an old steamer owned by its dishonest chief engineer, Massey. This is a story about deceit and the virtues and vices of man, a recurring theme for Conrad. The End of the Tether is a slow moving, but increasingly engrossing story that culminates in a surprising revelation.
Conrad utilises an ornate prose style to adeptly weave these challenging, atmospheric and insightful stories, which are concise by the standards of the period in which they were written.
August 1, 2016
Required reading. Even without this book's relation to the movie Apocalypse Now, the relevance to today and race make this a must for any library. Had a battered paperback copy but ordered a fine hardcover pocket edition that includes a story not in mine--"The End of the Tether." From a craft standpoint, Conrad is just a superb writer. One of the few to rise above the stilted conventions of 19th Century Literature. Being of Polish descent explains a lot, English was his second language. He's a master in the same league as Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Babel.
May 19, 2020
Sweaty.
June 9, 2024
Four very interesting tales—the longest being Conrad's most famous work, "Heart of Darkness." All four stories deal with European imperialism or colonialism in Africa and Asia. Conrad's writing is full of excellent and poetic descriptions of nature and the psychology of people, often in extreme circumstances. One recurring theme is the idea that the "civilized" European can become savage when removed from his environment of physical comforts and legal protection. Sometimes the writing is so obtuse and full of allegorical and metaphorical observations about the psyche that the context is hard to follow. At any rate, don't skip this classic. I also was slightly put off by the fact that the notorious Mr. Kurtz gets extremely little "on screen" action and dialogue compared to how much of the novella deals with the anticipation of meeting him and with reflections on him after he's no longer "on stage." The first three tales give some context for Conrad's favorite themes and for his most well-known character–narrator, Marlow.
August 17, 2024
For a long time I was struggling to articulate how I felt about this book. I was told it was written as a way of condemning imperialism and the effects it has, though I was not totally convinced. After reading Chinua Achebe’s essay/lecture ‘An Image of Africa’ I feel more confident in what I was thinking. Conrad’s portrayals of the Congolese people are pretty racist, it is as if he isn’t even describing them as people, but as creatures he is observing. The plot itself doesn’t really focus on the Congo either, but on the character of Kurtz; the Congo is merely a setting for his mental decline. It’s hard to take the narrators cries of horror seriously when they fail to treat the people around them as being equal to them. Achebe pulled a quote from Albert Schweitzer which I feel fits the vibe of ‘Heart of Darkness’ pretty accurately, “The African is indeed my brother but my junior brother”.
2 stars instead of 1 since the style of writing was good, I just didn’t like the substance.
2 stars instead of 1 since the style of writing was good, I just didn’t like the substance.
February 10, 2017
Heart of Darkness tells the tale of Charlie Marlow’s journey on an ivory transporter down an unknown river in the Congo. What he sees horrifies and perplexes him, calling into question the very basis of civilisation and human nature. The story follows this commercial agent and the object of his obsession, the notorious ivory-procurement agent Mr Kurtz. This novella has become an important piece in the western canon for its range of themes and scholarly values.
I remember reading this book a few years back and while I thought it was an interesting book, I never really grasped it completely (and I’m not sure if I ever will) but for comparison to what I know now and then, check out my review here. To begin with we need to gain an understanding of Joseph Conrad’s life because there are a lot of life experiences in this book. Born Josef Teodor Konrad Walecz Korzeniowski in Russian-ruled Poland in 1857; this part of Poland is now part of Ukraine. Both parents were political activists and as a result of their participation in the Polish independence movement they were exiled to Northern Russia in 1863. At sixteen he dropped out of school to work on a French merchant ship, sailing the West Indies as an apprentice. Later he joined a British ship where he served as a merchant for ten years, during this time he gained the rank of captain and became a naturalized British citizen. During a trip in 1890 sailing through the Belgian Congo and Congo River he got really sick and had to retire from sailing and focused his energy on writing. This means Joseph Conrad must have grown up speaking Polish and Russian, learning French at some point and then English. Although he often struggled to write in his adopted language, he is now considered one of the greatest prose stylists in English literature.
There are many themes explored in this book, so much so that I think I would need to keep reading this book again and again to discover them. Though major themes include slavery (the effect the British had on Africa) as well the author’s problems with Colonialism and Imperialism. There are a few other themes I would much prefer exploring. First of all, the idea of alienation; both Conrad and Marlow are both outsiders. The entire novel questions what alienation and loneliness can do to a person over an extended period of time, especially since they are in hostile environments. Even the doctor warns Marlow prior to his departure of changes to his personality that may be produced by a long stay in another country. Prolonged solitude seems to have damaging effects on the sailors, which leads me into another major theme; insanity. In the case of Kurtz, the loneliness lead to literal madness, while others like Marlow’s predecessor, Captain Fresleven was described as a gentle soul that transformed into a violent one.
There are other themes I really would love to talk about but for the sake of keeping this review a decent length I will just highlight them. Heart of Darkness also looks at the way Belgium is exploiting the Congo, order verse disorder, duty verse responsibility, doubt verse ambiguity, race verse racism and finally violence and cruelty. All these, plus many more, are reasons why this book has been studied. It is a very difficult book to explore, I found myself rereading passages trying to get more out of it. I know at one point near the start of reading this I thought I would never get enough meaning out of this book but eventually it opened up to me.
There are a lot of symbols within the book as well, beginning with the title and the setting; Heart of Darkness deep in the heart of the Congo, the centre of the deep dark Africa. Even the fact that the entire story is told in the late afternoon as the sun sets is a motif of Africa. There are a lot more in this novel but I want to quickly talk about the movie adaptation Apocalypse Now. Sure there are some similarities but not enough to really consider the movie to be based on this novella. There are more similarities with Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the way the book starts out, also with Bram Stokers’ Dracula with the suspension between life and death. So how are they the similar, since one is set in the Congo and the other during the Vietnam War? The very basic answer would be that both look at the deterioration of humanity as a result of conflict, one via imperialism and one by war.
I would love to talk about the narrative and how there are two narrators, Marlow and someone anonymous. And how all the scenes on the Nellie are obviously an introductory and critique to the story that it doesn’t go away after the intro. Marlow’s narrative is often interrupted by this unnamed narrator as they listen to the story as a way for Conrad to tell the reader to notice different themes. There are also the proses in the book, poetic and while difficult, you can get swept away and not really notice just what Conrad is trying to do. So many things I want to talk about but I have to cut this review short.
Heart of Darkness is a really complex book but if you take the time to break it apart and explore the text critically, you’ll find there is so much to appreciate. It’s like a fine meal, it can be enjoyed without any thought, but if you take the time to see how each element complements each other you end up enjoying the novella a whole lot more. It all comes together with a sense of satisfaction that while you might not know everything Joseph Conrad was trying to say, you know enough for the book to have real value.
This review originally appeared on my blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/book-rev...
I remember reading this book a few years back and while I thought it was an interesting book, I never really grasped it completely (and I’m not sure if I ever will) but for comparison to what I know now and then, check out my review here. To begin with we need to gain an understanding of Joseph Conrad’s life because there are a lot of life experiences in this book. Born Josef Teodor Konrad Walecz Korzeniowski in Russian-ruled Poland in 1857; this part of Poland is now part of Ukraine. Both parents were political activists and as a result of their participation in the Polish independence movement they were exiled to Northern Russia in 1863. At sixteen he dropped out of school to work on a French merchant ship, sailing the West Indies as an apprentice. Later he joined a British ship where he served as a merchant for ten years, during this time he gained the rank of captain and became a naturalized British citizen. During a trip in 1890 sailing through the Belgian Congo and Congo River he got really sick and had to retire from sailing and focused his energy on writing. This means Joseph Conrad must have grown up speaking Polish and Russian, learning French at some point and then English. Although he often struggled to write in his adopted language, he is now considered one of the greatest prose stylists in English literature.
There are many themes explored in this book, so much so that I think I would need to keep reading this book again and again to discover them. Though major themes include slavery (the effect the British had on Africa) as well the author’s problems with Colonialism and Imperialism. There are a few other themes I would much prefer exploring. First of all, the idea of alienation; both Conrad and Marlow are both outsiders. The entire novel questions what alienation and loneliness can do to a person over an extended period of time, especially since they are in hostile environments. Even the doctor warns Marlow prior to his departure of changes to his personality that may be produced by a long stay in another country. Prolonged solitude seems to have damaging effects on the sailors, which leads me into another major theme; insanity. In the case of Kurtz, the loneliness lead to literal madness, while others like Marlow’s predecessor, Captain Fresleven was described as a gentle soul that transformed into a violent one.
There are other themes I really would love to talk about but for the sake of keeping this review a decent length I will just highlight them. Heart of Darkness also looks at the way Belgium is exploiting the Congo, order verse disorder, duty verse responsibility, doubt verse ambiguity, race verse racism and finally violence and cruelty. All these, plus many more, are reasons why this book has been studied. It is a very difficult book to explore, I found myself rereading passages trying to get more out of it. I know at one point near the start of reading this I thought I would never get enough meaning out of this book but eventually it opened up to me.
There are a lot of symbols within the book as well, beginning with the title and the setting; Heart of Darkness deep in the heart of the Congo, the centre of the deep dark Africa. Even the fact that the entire story is told in the late afternoon as the sun sets is a motif of Africa. There are a lot more in this novel but I want to quickly talk about the movie adaptation Apocalypse Now. Sure there are some similarities but not enough to really consider the movie to be based on this novella. There are more similarities with Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the way the book starts out, also with Bram Stokers’ Dracula with the suspension between life and death. So how are they the similar, since one is set in the Congo and the other during the Vietnam War? The very basic answer would be that both look at the deterioration of humanity as a result of conflict, one via imperialism and one by war.
I would love to talk about the narrative and how there are two narrators, Marlow and someone anonymous. And how all the scenes on the Nellie are obviously an introductory and critique to the story that it doesn’t go away after the intro. Marlow’s narrative is often interrupted by this unnamed narrator as they listen to the story as a way for Conrad to tell the reader to notice different themes. There are also the proses in the book, poetic and while difficult, you can get swept away and not really notice just what Conrad is trying to do. So many things I want to talk about but I have to cut this review short.
Heart of Darkness is a really complex book but if you take the time to break it apart and explore the text critically, you’ll find there is so much to appreciate. It’s like a fine meal, it can be enjoyed without any thought, but if you take the time to see how each element complements each other you end up enjoying the novella a whole lot more. It all comes together with a sense of satisfaction that while you might not know everything Joseph Conrad was trying to say, you know enough for the book to have real value.
This review originally appeared on my blog; http://www.knowledgelost.org/book-rev...
January 11, 2021
Thanks to Conrad now I'm walking towards the heart of darkness with a gloom hovering in my mind...
July 30, 2025
(2,5⭐️) me van a quitar el título pero es que se me hizo bola
February 10, 2025
4/10
I honestly was not a big fan. What I thought would be a gripping little adventure turned out to be more of a nihilistic musing. Parts of the story are interesting, and it does raise some very interesting questions about mankind’s role in the order of nature. I just couldn’t really get into it, even if it is only 100 pages.
I honestly was not a big fan. What I thought would be a gripping little adventure turned out to be more of a nihilistic musing. Parts of the story are interesting, and it does raise some very interesting questions about mankind’s role in the order of nature. I just couldn’t really get into it, even if it is only 100 pages.
August 14, 2023
A ratos su profundidad me resultaba inabarcable. Pero cuando entendía, entendía.
April 20, 2021
This guy really likes boats.
July 8, 2012
This book contains three short stories by the hand of Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness, Youth and End of the tether.
What struck me about Heart of Darkness is that Conrad is absolutely brilliant at setting the mood for his story. The atmosphere was what I remember most about this story; it made me feel uneasy, yet at the same time sucked me in deeper into the world of Heart of Darkness.
Conrad is, in writing this story, very much a product of his time. He seems to be very aware of the 'white men's burden', or the need to improve the natives in Africa to become human beings instead of savages. At times he describes the natives in passing, they aren't really the focus of his story. But when he does, he doesn't seem to be judging. He finds them primitive, that's for sure, but he doesn't seem to consider them any less human. In fact, when a black subordinate of the main-character, Marlow, dies whilst they are trying to get to mr. Kurtz's camp, Marlow claims that getting to mr. Kurtz wasn't worth the life of his crew-member. Conrad seems to believe that the Africans must be 'improved', but doesn't seem to think him less than white men. Somewhere in the first pages of the book he describes how the Romans came to Great-Britain and found a primitive people, much like what the imperialists found when they went to Africa. By comparing Africa to Ancient England, it seems like he's saying that neither people are better than the other, a thought I find very interesting, considering the story was written during modern-imperialism's heyday.
I don't remember Youth much, it pales in comparison to End of the Tether, my favourite in this collection. Tether is different from the other two stories in style. Instead of the story being narrated by either the one who tells the story or someone who is listening to someone who tells the story, we get a third person narration. The story revolves around captain Whalley, once a famed man for discovering a shorter sailing route, now old and content to sail his little sailing ship around the eastern seas when the world around him turns on and changes rapidly with the introduction of steamers and such. That is, until his daughter appeals to him to send her money for her start up a boarding house, because her husband has gotten himself paralyzed from the waist down. He decides to sell his ship and supply his daughter with the money. The money he has left he uses to get into a partnership on a small steamer in an attempt to make more money for his daughter.
The great thing about Whalley is that he doesn't get stuck in his old age. He doesn't get bitter but is very positive about the world around him. He's powerful, upright and wise, a father-figure if you'd like. Besides that, I really felt for the man. His motives are honest, his "fall from grace" heartbreaking. The characters around him are despicable, driven by greed, trying to find fault in everybody else, but blind to their own. This makes for a striking contrast between Whalley, who has no worldly needs to speak of, all he does is for love of his daughter. That makes it all the more bitter that Massy and Sterne make it to the end of the story relatively unscathed, one of them even better of, and Whalley is condemned to another fate which I will not mention so as not to spoil anything.
What struck me about Heart of Darkness is that Conrad is absolutely brilliant at setting the mood for his story. The atmosphere was what I remember most about this story; it made me feel uneasy, yet at the same time sucked me in deeper into the world of Heart of Darkness.
Conrad is, in writing this story, very much a product of his time. He seems to be very aware of the 'white men's burden', or the need to improve the natives in Africa to become human beings instead of savages. At times he describes the natives in passing, they aren't really the focus of his story. But when he does, he doesn't seem to be judging. He finds them primitive, that's for sure, but he doesn't seem to consider them any less human. In fact, when a black subordinate of the main-character, Marlow, dies whilst they are trying to get to mr. Kurtz's camp, Marlow claims that getting to mr. Kurtz wasn't worth the life of his crew-member. Conrad seems to believe that the Africans must be 'improved', but doesn't seem to think him less than white men. Somewhere in the first pages of the book he describes how the Romans came to Great-Britain and found a primitive people, much like what the imperialists found when they went to Africa. By comparing Africa to Ancient England, it seems like he's saying that neither people are better than the other, a thought I find very interesting, considering the story was written during modern-imperialism's heyday.
I don't remember Youth much, it pales in comparison to End of the Tether, my favourite in this collection. Tether is different from the other two stories in style. Instead of the story being narrated by either the one who tells the story or someone who is listening to someone who tells the story, we get a third person narration. The story revolves around captain Whalley, once a famed man for discovering a shorter sailing route, now old and content to sail his little sailing ship around the eastern seas when the world around him turns on and changes rapidly with the introduction of steamers and such. That is, until his daughter appeals to him to send her money for her start up a boarding house, because her husband has gotten himself paralyzed from the waist down. He decides to sell his ship and supply his daughter with the money. The money he has left he uses to get into a partnership on a small steamer in an attempt to make more money for his daughter.
The great thing about Whalley is that he doesn't get stuck in his old age. He doesn't get bitter but is very positive about the world around him. He's powerful, upright and wise, a father-figure if you'd like. Besides that, I really felt for the man. His motives are honest, his "fall from grace" heartbreaking. The characters around him are despicable, driven by greed, trying to find fault in everybody else, but blind to their own. This makes for a striking contrast between Whalley, who has no worldly needs to speak of, all he does is for love of his daughter. That makes it all the more bitter that Massy and Sterne make it to the end of the story relatively unscathed, one of them even better of, and Whalley is condemned to another fate which I will not mention so as not to spoil anything.
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