Product Description

Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a profound exploration into the human subconscious twinned with a terrifying portrayal of the dangers of imperialism. Seaman Marlow tells of his journey to the heart of the Belgian Congo in search of the elusive Mr Kurtz. Away from civilisation as he knows it, he comes to reassess not only his own values, but also those of nature and of society. For in this heart of darkness, it is the terrifying face of human savagery that becomes most visible.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #803739 in Books
• Published on: 2002-07-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 152 pages

From the Publisher
Only edition with complete Diary of Congo, edited by leading Conrad scholar Professor Z. Najder

About the Author
Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in Berdichiv in the Ukraine in 1857. His father, a landless gentleman, a poet, and translator of English, French, and German literature, was active in the Polish patriotic underground, which resulted in his imprisonment and in his family’s exile to Vologda in northern Russia and later in the eastern Ukraine. There, in Chernihiv, Conrad’s mother died in 1867. Once released from exile, his father soon died of tuberculosis and, from 1869, Conrad was supported by his uncle,Tadeusz Bobrowski. After school in Kraków, Conrad persuaded Bobrowski to let him join the French merchant marine with whom he was to travel to the West Indies several times between 1875 and 1878.
His career continued in the British merchant marine, where he rose from common seaman to first mate, obtaining his master mariner’s certificate, and, in 1886, command of his own vessel, Otago. (It was also in .... that Conrad became a British subject.s) His following years at sea were to prove vastly influential on his writing, as he sailed all over the world, and, most famously, up the Congo river in 1890, a journey depicted in his tale, Heart of Darkness (written 1899, published 1902).
Conrad settled in England in 1894, and married Jessie George in 1896, having published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, in 1895. Writing in his third language, a language he did not learn until aged twenty, Conrad did not achieve financial and popular success until Chance (1913), although earlier works such as Nostromo (1904),The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911), are held in greater critical esteem. Joseph Conrad died in 1924, and, after a brief period of neglect, was declared by F.R. Leavis in 1941, as ‘among the very greatest novelists in the language’.

Excerpted from Heart of Darkness, and Diary of Congo by Joseph Conrad, A.N. Wilson. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Poor fool! If he had only left that shutter alone. He had no restraint, no restraint just like Kurtz – a tree swayed by the wind. As soon as I had put on a dry pair of slippers, I dragged him out, after first jerking the spear out of his side, which operation I confess I performed with my eyes shut tight. His heels leaped together over the little doorstep; his shoulders were pressed to my breast; I hugged him from behind desperately. Oh! he was heavy, heavy; heavier than any man on earth, I should imagine. Then without more ado I tipped him overboard. The current snatched him as though he had been a wisp of grass, and I saw the body roll over twice before I lost sight of it forever. All the pilgrims and the manager were then congregated on the awning-deck about the pilot-house, chattering at each other like a flock of excited magpies, and there was a scandalised murmur at my heartless promptitude. What they wanted to keep that body hanging about for I can't guess. Embalm it, maybe. But I had also heard another, and a very ominous, murmur on the deck below. My friends, the woodcutters, were likewise scandalised, and with a better show of reason – though I admit that the reason itself was quite inadmissible. Oh, quite! I had made up my mind that if my late helmsman was to be eaten, the fishes alone should have him. He had been a very second-rate helmsman while alive, but now he was dead he might have become a first-class temptation, and possibly cause some startling trouble. Besides, I was anxious to take the wheel, the man in pink pyjamas showing himself a hopeless duffer at the business.