Story of a man on a boat. Such a powerful book, the corruption of the imperial powers and the depection of the people it wielded its rot through. ( )

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness isn't a very festive title for this time of the year, but this audiobook, superbly narrated by David Horovitch, been my companion at bedtime while I can't read myself to sleep. (Eye trouble, again. *sigh*). The cumulative effect of nodding off half way through each CD and starting again the next night is that I now know some parts of the story off by heart and that I have a renewed appreciation of Conrad's inimitable style.

I had read it before. Many years ago when I was too young to appreciate it or even follow the plot, and again in 2003, when wrote about it in my reading journal and drew parallels with The Piano Tuner (2002) by Daniel Mason because TPT was about colonialism in Burma. I didn't record which edition of Heart of Darkness I had read, but I suspect it was one without an introduction because I made no reference to Edward Said's 1996 doctoral dissertation 'Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography'. But there are now multiple summaries and reviews of Heart of Darkness online, scholarly and otherwise, some claiming it's a masterpiece and others denouncing it as so racist as to be worthless. There is no need for me to compete with those. I'm just sharing my thoughts here from 2003, such as they were.


31st December 2003,
Reading Journal #6 Aug 03 - April 04
Heart of Darkness is set in the 19th century Belgian Congo. It's about the journey deep along the Congo River of a sea captain called Marlow, whose assignment is to locate an ivory trader called Kurtz, who is said to be ill. Marlow is delayed, deliberately, en route by the machinations of a manager who sees himself in competition for promotion with Kurtz, an enigmatic and very successful trading station manager who brings in more ivory than anyone else.

Due to the deliberate delay — Marlow's ship has been sunk in the river and the rivets to repair it can't be delivered — Kurtz is left isolated upriver for months, and finally succumbs to illness and dies on Marlow's return journey. (Carroll also dies in The Piano Tuner, but in different circumstances.) What is similar in both stories is that Kurtz has been 'corrupted' by the Congo and has 'gone native'. This was something much feared by colonials in far flung places, and they set great store on maintaining dress codes and imperial habits, not the least of which was to maintain contempt for the 'savages'.

Marlow doesn't sentimentalise the natives. They are cannibals, and they have some pretty horrible practices. Yet he can see that they had common sense in abandoning European projects as soon as they could escape from being press-ganged into slavery. He could understand why stretcher-bearers had no moral obligation to carry sick white men who — when healthy — had treated them so appallingly. And as Marlow progresses on his journey and witnesses shocking atrocities practised by the colonists — including, most horrifically by Kurtz —Conrad is clearly questioning just who the savages in colonial Africa really were.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2024/12/27/heart-of-darkness-1899-by-joseph-conrad-read... ( )

Confusing at times but very well written. ( )

OMG, when will I ever stop reading classics? I made it to the end. That's all I can say. ( )

How did a book I loathe so much turn into one of my favorite films? I’ll never understand. Give me Apocalypse Now any day. ( )

An excellent read. However, the madness of Kurtz at the end is, by some commentators, attributed to malaria. Why not sleeping sickness (Human African Trypanosomiasis)? Such symptoms are not inconsistent with advanced stages of the disease. ( )

Soaring. Every sentence in this classic short story soars. It never feels ordinary. Instead the sentences fill us with feelings more than detail. They all leave us with a basic message - just being here will change you forever. The story starts in England but quickly shifts to the dark continent, Africa. It is vast and seemingly unknowable. The focus is on the Congo, the river leading deep into the jungle. The colonizers are there to extract something, in this case ivory. Civilizing the savages they find is a byproduct, the focus is getting the ivory. There is the white man's burden, their Christian duty. But the focus is on extracting wealth. Companies are formed in England and Belgium for the specific purpose of getting the resources known to exist in Africa.

We follow one man's desire for adventure. He wants to go where the maps are incomplete. He's a sailor and is hired to captain a Congo river steamer. He quickly learns everything is in disrepair. He learns the fate of his predecessor. With every paragraph the story gets darker. We eventually learn there is one man who surpasses all the rest in collecting the ivory the employers desperately want. But mystery surrounds the legendary Mr. Kurtz, whose name is actually German for short. The natives seem to worship him. He appears to have gone native. There's been no word from him for ages. As our narrator goes further and further inland on his steamer he gets closer and closer to Kurtz who is known to go off into the jungle by himself. The steamer is attacked by savages throwing spears and shooting arrows. They are dangerous but no match for the rifles on the steamer. The steamer narrowly escapes. They reach a clearing. At the entrance to Kurtz's camp there are heads of his enemies on poles. Intimidation is clearly at work. But Kurtz is sick. He has survived several illnesses in the past but now he appears weak. In his delirium he utters his signature catch phrase – "The Horror, the horror". Kurtz takes a liking to the narrator, giving him a package for his "intended", a woman he intended to marry years ago before venturing into the Congo to make his fortune.

When our barrator returns to England he seeks out Kurtz's intended. When she wants to know what were Kurtz's last words, he decides it is best to lie and say her name was on Kurtz's lips. Nothing is what it seems. Everything is.....darker.

Definitely worth your time. ( )

This was a very quick, easy read. The pacing is spot-on. I recommend it just for that reason. But, to be honest, I don't really understand what happened in Chapter 3. I think I do, but maybe I ONLY think I do. It's a "classic" though, I don't really understand half of those, so... well, maybe I'll just leave it at that. ( )

first try: high school -- read most of it, couldn't stand to finish it. also had a poor experience with how the book was taught.

second try: early 20s - only made it about 40ish pages. ditto for 3rd try in my 30s.

gave the book away so doubt will retry it a 4th time.

I'm not sure that I could give this a 5 star rating in good conscience because of the plodding nature of the story (which is odd, considering it is a very short novel). That being said, I found the prose-poetry to be beautiful in many parts, so much so that I really can't believe Conrad is NOT a native English speaker. This book depicts horror in ways that I've never read before. This is an important novel to read not only because it is a classic (love it or hate it, I'm not sure there is much of an in-between), but because it really delves into what imperialism may mean. ( )

I taught this novella with my AP English students and the discussions we had were some of the most exciting and challenging I ever dealt with. Kurtz's "The horror! The horror!" could have kept us going for more classes than I had time for. It was a thrill. ( )

By the time of reading this I had watched Apocalypse Now more than once and I was primed to compare the two. A part of AN that I had never really 'got' was what Kurtz's whole deal was. Unsurprisingly this works much better in Heart of Darkness.

A few things really struck me from this short book. The first is the dichotomy of its anti-imperialism and its 19th century racism—Conrad describes in great detail the horrors of Belgian imperialism. and the disgust which he feels to the indolent whites who occupy the 'Central Station'. At the same time, Africans are primeval savages, humanised only by Marlowe's esoteric knowledge that whites are closer to them than they would like to believe should they be defrocked of the European civilisation that has been built around them. Something that I think that has been missed a little in the debate over whether HOD should be excluded from literary canon is the passage where Marlowe is amazed at the 'restraint' the starving cannibal African crew on the Roi des Belges exercises in not slaughtering and devouring their white masters. Restraint is a virtue of high civilisation, beloved chiefly by the Romans, but something which is completely lacking in the Whites, most emphatically in Kurtz.

Second is the excellent prose, the subjective device of Marlowe's tale is realised really well, and his solliquoys on human nature, civilisation etc. are beautifully written and dovetails well with his piercing the veil on human nature.

Third is the Kurtz character; while I agree with Achebe that I don't find the Kurtz character sympathetic in any way with the backdrop of 10 million dead Africans draped behind the story, I do find the existential horror of Kurtz's descent quite interesting. Not so much the descent itself, but in what the endpoint means. Kurtz's humanitarian ideals fail because he discovers that it is impossbile to do good while engaging in an economy of imperial extraction. But being a renassaince man, a man of lofty intellect, he understands that to engage truly effectively in this operation you must not just discard those ideals, but wholeheartedly adopt a completely new set. To become a brutal Chieftan, and to ally yourself with a section of the population so they may be effectively deployed against the others. To form a syncretic belief system with yourself as the high-priest. The whites of the Central Station can't export as much ivory as Kurtz because they are entitled to become rich and powerful by doing nothing but risking death by dysentary and beating slaves. Kurtz commits his whole self to the operation, and although it is brutal and anaethema to the European onlookers, in reality it is no more brutal than their own practices, at least Kurtz has obliterated the contradiction. This, in my mind, is at the heart of Marlowe's bizarre loyalty to Kurtz.

I liked the book. Enjoyable and a relatively quick read if you stay on it. I did get distracted for a week.

That said, I do feel like I was missing something. I don't understand the Kurtz situation. Why does everyone care about him so much. The various side characters could be reacting to his efficiency at ivory collection or previous interactions. But why does Marlow care so much? I could understand an interest this man so highly esteemed. The shown interactions between the two is effectively non-existent. We are told Kurtz is so amazing, but not shown anything.

I'm sitting here wondering if a page didn't print in this cheap copy I have.

Or, maybe, that lack of demonstrating anything of interest from Kurtz IS the point. That his ability to extract wealth from Africa for the company was what made everyone view him as great. However, being effective alone is not enough to get a person recognition.

Ultimately, that massive complaint is tied to the payoff of the journey. The journey itself is still a good story and effective in showing how the company doesn't care about the people of Africa while cruelly exploiting them.

I don't get the point of setting the story so that it is Marlow recounting his experience in Africa to his friends. That extra layer doesn't add anything. At least for me. There's no interactivity between Marlow and the listeners. It also means all the paragraphs (99%) start with quote marks which is kind of annoying. That conceit is superfluous.

There is a quote I really liked from the book. "I don't like work--no man does--but I like what is in the work--the chance to find yourself. Your own reality--for yourself, not for others--what no other man can ever know." I think it does relate to Kurtz. He found himself in his work and he didn't like himself.

I highly recommend the Norton Critical Edition which includes the novel in full as well as several contemporaneous and modern essays that contextualize and add to your understanding of the novel. ( )

This is too short to be difficult. Anything by Conrad is riveting ( )

This is one of those books that is in the culture so deeply that you tend to feel like you've read it already, but reading it remains a different experience altogether. I was impressed by the language and the flow of the story. It really does get under your skin. ( )

Here's one of those works traditionally considered a classic that I'd managed to not read until fairly late in life. I was surprised, by the way, at how short it is: only 72 pages in the Dover Thrift edition I have.

I can see where the supposed classic status comes from. Conrad's writing is incredibly evocative. As for what it's evocative of... Well, it's certainly an interesting thing to read this here in the 21st century, on the other side of the colonial era. It is, as they say, very much Of Its Time, but in a complicated way that I find worth pondering. Conrad is writing about the absurdity, the inhumanity, and, yes, the horror of Europeans' exploitation of Africa. He's also writing that criticism very much from inside the cultural framework that produced those horrors, which means that there's an incredibly limited effort and an even more limited ability to imagine what things look like from other perspectives. It also means a preoccupation with ideas of "civilization" and "savagery" that seem, now, to be quite simplistic and wrongheaded, but which are explored here in a complex way that gives a genuinely interesting window onto the thoughts and fears surrounding these ideas at the time. And, yeah, let's not mince words: it's super racist. I mean, by the standards of the time, even the repeated insistence that the Africans in the story are completely human may have been unusual, but, y'know, one kinda wants to set the bar higher than that. In my mind, though, the value of reading this doesn't lie in the way it lets us pat ourselves on the back for being more enlightened, but in getting this rather dark and tortured glimpse into that past and into what it looked like to someone who, despite all that comparative lack of enlightenment, was still horrified by it.

I'm not sure if I've expressed any of that very well. I also feel like I ought to have a lot more intelligent things to say about the story and the writing, and especially about the character of Mr. Kurtz. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what to make of the character of Mr. Kurtz. He's not exactly what I was expecting from what I'd osmosed about this piece of writing, either. If nothing else, I was expecting there to be... more of him.

Rating: I'm going to call this 4/5, for the writing, and for how worthwhile it is from a cultural and historical perspective, but, y'know, take that with all the appropriate caveats. ( )

Adversity

I don't really get the hoo-hah of 'Heart of Darkness' (or whether that's the right spelling of hoo-hah). Is this not just a tale of an apprehensive man in an unfamiliar land who journeys the Congo to retrieve a supposedly revered second man, who actually turns out to be not all-that impressive but instead solipsistic and plagued by a manic lust for Ivory? Then, for reasons unbeknownst to me, the protagonist returns hell bent on preserving the good name of this deified 'Kurtz' (who pops his clogs soon after his retrieval) without any great reason to. Was it purely due to the empathy he shared of the suffocating wilderness?

I don't know, allegory along with the book seems very overrated: there are only so many cluttered, wordy sentences I can take about a river, a jungle and the dark and it certainly didn't inspire me to think about any darkness within myself; perhaps I need a 'lighter' read. Ha. ( )

heart of darkness, more like heart of racism ( )

This is a well known book and I picked up from the library because I had not yet read it. Sadly I did not enjoy it. Overblown passages. Deviations from the narrative. ( )

The book was written during the time of British colonial rule and the writing reflects attitudes of the period, so read in the context of that time. The context is horrific, with use of language that is uncomfortable to read.

Aside from the content, the story is written in a very unusual way and I personally liked the style. The story is told from a third party as opposed to the horse's mouth: written in the first person, the character tells the readers the story he was told by someone with whom he sailed alongside. This makes for an interesting read as well as a separation between the character and the events in the story, as if to inform the readers he does not associate with what happened in Africa as he recognises the controversial societal views. ( )

Meh. I can't say I really care enough about this book to even write a very detailed review. Being that zillions of people have read it, I doubt my .02 is of much consequence anyway. I guess I can say that I've finally found a story more depressing than Wuthering Heights, (which is my GOAT book so don't get all flippy outty, Bronteites...). I get it that the symbolism and metaphors run deep---maybe someday I'll feel like expounding on them. But for now, can I just say, PRAISE YAH I'm finished with this story. ( )

As a kid I tried to read this book, as it was an influence on both Apocalypse Now--a movie I dug. I couldn't finish it, and chalked it up to not being smart enough to get it. I want to travel back in time and tell that young man that he was right. This is a horrible novel that insists on itself.

I'm going to avoid the politics as Chinua Achebe's criticism of the book nails it. The Africans aren't given a voice or a human image, the n-word is tossed around too much, and it's silly to talk about a frontier where people of color live normal lives as a horrendous hellscape for the white man.

Instead I want to focus on the artistry. I fell asleep reading it thrice. It's clunky. It features a third person omniscient narrator, but the bulk of the story is told from a lead who narrates to a room full of people who don't react. (It would've made more sense to have Marlowe tell the story as a journal--making him a dark mirror to Kurtz and his writings.) He hits you over the head with the theme way too much with the word "dark" appearing rougly every three pages. There is no intensity to the travel. And the only intriguing part--the eventual meeting between Marlowe and Kurtz--is too brief. Although it does provide one of the best dialogue exchanges, one that Coppolla stole for his film verbatim.

Avoid. By God, avoid this book. ( )

Si Marlow yung tropa sa inuman na imbis mag-ambag sa alak pulutan dinaan nalang sa kwento ( )