Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #142076 in Books
• Published on: 2000-02-24
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Synopsis
Marlow voyages into the wildness and jungle of the Belgian Congo to meet Kurtz, a company agent, and having found him, realizes that Kurtz has won supremacy over the natives through unrestrained violence. The story explores the workings of the subconscious, and addresses political imperialism.

Customer Reviews

An uphill struggle
I'd wanted to read this book for years but only got around to it this year. I confess, I wanted to do so more as a fan of 'Apocalypse Now' than as a literary buff. I chose not to read any review of it in advance, I knew it was a classic and therefore needed no justification. However...I was totally unprepared for the uphill struggle of Conrad's narration. Quite how he inspires such an obsessive following (see: josephconradsociety.org) I can not understand.

In truth I was fairly disappointed: the narrative is dull and confusing, the parallels between the darkness of Africa and the darkness in the soul of Man are not as apparent nor striking as more scholarly readers would lead you to believe.

If, like me, you feel that you owe it to yourself to find out why a particular 'literary classic' is considered to be so by reading it yourself rather than reading the Cliff Notes version, then I would recommend this version: the introduction and notes by Robert Hampton were in some instances highly educational, especially the detail regarding Henry Morton Stanley (not a nice fellow after all...).

If you read simply for enjoyment and entertainment then I suspect you may be disappointed by Heart of Darkness, but don't let that put you off, as long as you're prepared to scale a big hill.

The Engine Of Life Basks In The Recesses Of Inverted Light
Conrad's Heart Of Darkness is not an easy read. The text is dense and ornamental - suffering from frequent procrastination - but the substance and subject matter compelled me to persevere with this slim novelette. The story revolves around a sailor Marlow recounting his journey into the wilds of the Africa by river to meet Kurtz - the most successful ivory-procurement agent in the Congo. Marlow becomes obsessed with tales of the enigmatic and successful Kurtz, who seems to have more substance than all the shallow disdainful bureaucrats he encounters throughout his journey. But when he eventually discovers Kurtz, and the savage reality of his methods, it shakes Marlow's beliefs and makes him reassess his own values.

What really lets this novelette down is the fact it's supposed to be Marlow recounting a tale to a group, and the true narrator and the rest of the group are supposedly listening attentively to Marlow. But if in reality someone really spoke like this recounting a story you would lose interest because of the overly descriptive language, or you would demand the person to get to the point. No one who recounts a tale with such intricate language could expect an enthralled audience. On paper - yes, it works as you can go back and savior on the sentences, but as a spoken word tale the words would tangle together and their subtle meaning would be lost. Try reading a few pages out loud to someone you know and you'll see their interest start to waver.

Aside from the language, and its context, I felt there was something vital Conrad was striving towards here. The darkness and emptiness of soul and of society are beautifully rendered without ever becoming overtly moral or dogmatic. This is a book would read again as I feel there is so much more to discover. But I believe it is best taken on in one sitting in a setting with few distractions. An airplane companion it is not.

Dense and difficult, ultimately rewarding.
I'm sure many readers will, like me, find this a difficult read, the prose almost as dense and impenetrable as the jungle that Marlowe travels down in order to find his truth. Still, having only read it through once, I did get enough out of it to believe that further study will reveal some profound light in the heart of darkness. At only 100 odd pages, it does seem to have been designed by the author to be returned to again and again, small enough to swallow, but needing longer to fully digest.

Some passages are genuinely quite unnerving, with a sense successfully conveyed of a man who has cut away the veneer of civilisation, looked into the soul of humanity, and seen something truly disturbing. In short, this book is about nihilism, about the flimsy and shifting world of language that alone seperates humanity from the other animals (but only in a delusory sense). The power of Kurtz is almost wholly cast by his words, a potency maintained even whilst barely existing as a decaying, dying body. The story juxtaposes the power of language, through the dense tale spun by Marlowe of the mythical but ultimately physically insubstantial Kurtz, with the raw natural savagery of the African jungle and its muscular and visceral inhabitants. Language is what seperates the human from the animal, but in the heart of darkness, language, and through it civilisation, is revealed to be a false god created ultimately to serve animal passions.

Moreover, the novel contains the message that when man tries to shed his 'civilising' light on those judged to be savages, he merely succeeds in laying bare the moral emptiness of his own soul. Something to think about and to fruitfully connect with the war in Iraq, just as others did with Vietnam.