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. ( )