Customer Reviews

Heart of Darkness (Hesperus Classics)

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

So much has been written about 'Heart of Darkness' that it is hard to contribute to the discussion without immediately becoming redundant. But here is one point: part of the beauty of this masterpieces is that it - like all great works of art - functions on many levels. You can look at it as a criticism of Imperialism, as many have, although nowadays this traditional viewpoint seems stale. You may enjoy it for its masterful use of the English language; in fact, I can think of no better 'classical' tale form except perhaps that of Moby Dick. You may be startled by a short passage that strikes you as profound in its psychological richness. You can marvel at the strange character development where both Marlowe and Kurtz somehow remain elusive. And there is much more to ponder if you open your mind and simply allow the words to feed your imagination. Read it slowly, deliberately, and enjoy. It is doubtless one of the strangest works of English literature ever produced but perhaps also one of the best.

I read this book in my advanced English class my senior year and at first I was a bit unethusiastic. The introduction is a bit tedious and long describing in detail how Marlow decides to travel to Africa and how he gets there through his aunt's help. But by the second chapter I was intrigued and by the end of the novel it became my favourite book.
Joseph Conrad is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest writer of the English language and the funny thing is it is his third language (behind Polish and French). He decided to write "Heart of Darkness" in English because according to him English has words no other language has that he wanted to put in this novel.
The book starts out on a steamboat on the Thames River where the narrarator is talking with a number of other folks on board. Marlow sits (like Buddha) nearby and just starts talking. He then becomes the central speaker and through the narrarator, Marlow's story is told. As a young lad he saw the Congo River and he became transfixed with it and decided one day he would go to Africa. When he becomes an adult his aunt gets him a job in Africa at a Central Station where the head manager manages the smaller stations that are bringing in ivory. Here is where the story hooks the reader. Out in the middle of the jungle is a man by the name of Kurtz. This man is greatly admired and hated at the same time because he is bringing more ivory than all of the stations combined, yet he is the only one out there excluding the Africans he took with him. He sends back any man who has been an assistant to him and the only word out is that he was considering coming back but turned his steamboat around and stayed out in the jungle. Marlow's job is to find him.
The book is amazing and beautifully written. It is almost like a poem with outstanding word images and depth in the words. The theme of the novel is "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." In my opinion the novel is not so much on colonization in Africa as the theory of Conrad's that man is capable of anything and that when a person is out in the middle of nowhere they are capable of anything. Both Kurtz and Marlow are people to be admired, Marlow because he hates lies and the colonization and Kurtz because he always tells the truth. He knows what he did and that is why his last words are "The horror! The horror!" He is the horror.
The novel is a beautifully sculpted nightmare of what man is capable of. It is my favourite book and I think everyone should read it.

When Kurtz exclaims "The Horror! The Horror!", it is in the same sense that we would also cry out if suddenly faced with the unshielded countenance of God. At the threshhold, just before we were either consumed, or absorbed, this too would be our cry.

This most remarkable of books is a dissection of the Western psyche. We start with the capital city of the living dead in Europe itself. This is a land of sleepwalkers who have never awakened- they live out their lives spinning castles in the air that ultimately mean nothing. This is the state of the modern Western mind. Theory and profit, but no soul. On the journey down the African coast we encounter the European battleship antiseptically shelling the coast. These are tranplanted westerners hiding in the shells of their technological terrors while lobbing shells into the outer world- without really being contaminated by it (or so they hoped.) Then we reach the coast, where the high ideals preached in Europe are more and more obviously abandoned the farther inland one travels.

When the land and the natives become "difficult", pure force and brutality are used to overcome and destroy. In other words, if they will not be "westernised", turned into copies of us, they must be obliterated. Preferably while making us a profit.

Kurtz was a strong man. He was ambitious and powerful. Perhaps he kept up the charade of "civilising" the natives and the land in the name "progress" longer than anyone else. He kept up these empty lies until he penetraded to the deepest core of the primeval jungle. And then, this hollow shell of ideals and greed imploded. You see, as Conrad points out, Kurtz was fundamentally hollow. Yet Kurtz didn't just die, he was too strong. Instead, into that vacuum rushed the primal force itself. Kurtz became what he hated the most- he became the soul of the jungle- because he had none of his own. He became an "animal" in it's highest sense, a totally natural man. Indeed he became a natural King, as the native tribes recognised. He and the land were truly one.

It is a mistake to judge Kurtz by the standards of the city of the dead. Kurtz and his warriors sweeping across the jungle, taking heads and ivory as trophies, was as natural as lions running down gazelles.... Far more natural than the hypocritical, brutal, soulless, enslavement of the coastal natives in the name of "civilisation".....

On my third try in 10 years, I finally got through Heart of Darkness. The first two times I was scared away by the prose and the heaviness of its reputation as a "classic" (an appelation that kills so many books), but I decided, after re-watching Apocalypse Now, that I needed to set aside some time to read the novella. And I'm glad I did - what a wonderfully dark, penetrating novel... right in the vein of turn-of-the-century symbolism, but with one foot grounded firmly in the real world. It's a nightmare rendered more nightmarish because it happens in broad daylight.

A word on the prose: When I first tried reading Heart of Darkness years ago, I felt the same way as a lot of the negative reviewers here, namely, that Conrad's prose was dull, overly ornamental, and cumbersome. This time I was amazed by how effective it is: Marlowe's speech is pregnant with irony and shards of bitter humor, and the ornamental nature kicks up whenever he finds he cannot express "the horror" in mere words. It the prose of desperation, exposing -like the fragile veneer of civilization- the falsity of language when dealing with the primal darkness.

So why not 5 stars? As amazing and thought-provoking as the novella is, that ending should have been cut. Its melodrama rings a little false after the enormity of what we've just read, and even though the irony hangs heavy, the pace grinds to a halt. After Kurtz, we want to sink into ourselves; the jarring return to our own lives is enough to accomplish the irony that Conrad intended.

Almost perfect. And highly recommended.

After reading Barack Obama's autobiography, I felt I must read Heart of Darkness again to confirm my belief that Obama was wrong in his assessment of Conrad's novella and of Conrad himself. Obama says, "It is a racist book. The way Conrad sees it, Africa's the cesspool of the world, black folks are savages, and any contact with them breeds infections."
Most reviewers of Heart of Darkness consider Marlow to be the narrator. I say, read again, and study the words. The narrator of the novella is not Marlow. The narrator could be Conrad himself. The narrator begins by telling of himself and 3 mates in a friendly gathering aboard a ship - Marlow being one of the 4. The narrator makes no judgments of his own except to say that Marlow was "the only man of us who still 'followed the sea.'" And, "The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class."
The narrator quotes Marlow throughout the novella, and in that way Marlow becomes the narrator of his own story.
Marlow's story is one of conflict within himself regarding the loyalty he must feel towards a man whom he knows to be evil: Kurtz, who conquers the minds of men, black and white, places admiration in the whites and fear in the blacks. Kurtz is the epitome of the hateful, negative, "superior" white. His only interest is in gaining fame and riches. Ivory, ivory. Plunder and raid. The natives of Africa are his tools. Kurtz's soul is "the heart of darkness."
Marlow tells the story of his voyage to meet and rescue Kurtz, a dying man. On board his ship, Marlow has a crew of blacks, whose hunger is not necessarily of his choosing: "Why in the name of all gnawing devils of hunger they didn't go for us...amazes me...It takes a man all his inborn strength to fight hunger properly. It's easier to face bereavement, dishonor, and the perdition of one's soul than this kind of prolonged hunger."
Marlow explains away Kurtz's character even before he meets him: "Hadn't I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all other agents together? That was not the point. The point was in his being a gifted creature...the gift that stood out preeminently....was his ability to talk, his words - the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness."
Marlow repeatedly speaks of the darkness of Kurtz's soul. "The thing was to know what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own...He had taken a high seat amongst the devils of the land." Kurtz, Marlow said, had sold his soul to the devil.
In spite of this revulsion for Kurtz's "darkness," Marlow remains loyal to him. Who can say that that is unnatural or unrealistic? A flaw, yes, but not unusual to acknowledge the evil, dark side of a man, yet pledge loyalty to him. Forget not the followers of Hitler, Saddam, and now Ahmadinejad! (I've heard justifications: "Hitler lied to us.")
Marlow himself was not an evil soul. As for his racist statements and use of racist terminology, "savages" and the like, remember the story takes place in the 19thC at the latest. It would be a lie to deny that most whites then believed in a God-given superiority over all other races, particularly the blacks. And what we now consider "racist" words and appellations were then commonplace. Yes, meant to demean and "put them in their places." But I would no more expect Conrad to sanitize those words, in relating this terrible story, than I would expect a WW2 historian to write about the hatred towards Japanese without using the words Japs, Nips, yellow bellies, slant-eyes, or the like. Hateful? Yes. Wrong? Yes. But that's the way it was.
Heart of Darkness is, indeed, about racism and false sense of racial superiority. Conrad tells that story in the "darkest" way possible through the "heart of darkness" that lives within the darkest of souls. But to accuse Conrad of being a racist or to imply that the novella is racist, I think is wrong. To "write about" and "to be" are two different things.
Obama says..."the book's not about Africa or black people. It's about the man who wrote it...I read the book to help me understand just what makes the white people so afraid." Obama is only half right. He should read the book and analyze it in an objective light to understand that Conrad is talking about the evils of racism.

this is a very powerful, irony laden book that on one level talks about the idiocies of colonial expansion and on another takes you on a journey inside yourself, into the "heart of darkness" as Conrad puts it. it is a very dense book, even though it looks short at first, it takes a while to read. Also it has many levels of meaning that can only be drawn by careful reading. Nevertheless, anyone can gain a profound amount from this book, it is a classic of english literature and is recommended for anyone. Though I like nonfiction books much more, I do appreciate fiction if it is powerful and interesting to me, which this book most certainly is.

This novel was an exciting swirl of adventure, underlying history, and a good deal of morals that people that were alive in those times enjoyed. Joseph Conrad does an excellent job of blending all of these things together to make a novel that tells a story and teaches a lesson at the same time. Conrad does several themes throughout this novel. One of those themes is the ongoing battle between good and evil/light and darkness. This struggle is represented through the good deeds and intentions of the Europeans against the will of the Forest and its malice that corrupts the open-minded. He also uses the "Russian Doll" technique that displays a story within a story. He uses this to show events of the past through character flashbacks and tell stories of the past through multiple-character narration. He also uses many examples of futility like putting out fires with buckets that have holes in them and shooting at a random African coastline with the cannons of a ship along with other similar examples.
I believe that a book can always be more fun to the reader than a movie due to the use of imagination that a movie with its visual effects can easily limit. Also a book is the original thoughts of the author whereas a movie that is only based on the book the ideas of the author are subject to change by the director. All in all I believe that a book is ninety eight percent of the time going to be better than its movie.

"And if you gaze into the abyss,
the abyss gazes also in to you"
-Nietzsche- (beyond good and evil)

I'm 26, to a reader of my generation is very difficult to approach this novel without remembering scenes from Coppola's mesmerical movie, but, once you get on the boat and start going up river, you are way beyond anything previously told.
Conrad's story deals with the perils of a young sailor,Marlow, sent to find old, misterious man Kurtz, to do this Marlow takes a boat up a river deep in the heart of the dark congo, as the story moves on, the plot gets more and more psycological, as if with every mile travelled the narration needed to get more technical, more insightful.
The heart of darkness takes us too close to a sane mind going off the ground, it's a wonderful book.

This book requires all of your attention, and the entire time you read it, you may wonder why you are bothering to keep the book open. The first time I read it, I thought it was a decent story about the jungle, until about a day later as I slowly began to realize that this was one of the best books I had ever read. It is perfectly titled. The Heart of Darkness. The story of how an exemplary member of civilized society--an intelligent, educated, and emotionally stable human--can fall to the animalistic brutality that we "civilized" people prefer to relegate to the Third World or to antiquity. This book is earthshaking just because it forces the realization that our own 'humanity' rests on the fragile trappings of society. One only need read the headlines of the latest events in the Middle East or in the setting of the story, Africa, to understand that the Heart of Darkness is as relevant today as ever. Conrad's perfect prose in his second language and his quiet, observant, and always understating demeanor are bonuses to readers of this timeless work.

Conrad was prolific and at moments as cryptic as Henry James, indeed, the two influenced one another.

Perhaps, his enigmatic style is why his writings appeal to so many. We are forced to take part in his stories, filling in details from our own experiences, making the story unique from each individual's perspective.

The heart of darkness is a comment on the darkness of man's soul symbolized by the descent into a foreboding thick jungle.

The story is rich with alternating sequences of light/ dark and clarity/ambiguity creating a mood of mystery and uncertainty which never leaves you.

The story has several narrators creating a bewildering effect perhaps to symbolize our own inner struggle with existence and it's meaning.

We are introduced to Marlowe, one of the narrators, and indirectly told about Kurtz, a legendary ivory trader.

As Marlowe enters the depths of the jungle in hopes of meeting Kurtz, Marlowe undergoes a psychological transformation as civilization is stripped around him. We see how man reverts to his true inner state when material possessions, titles and other superficialities are removed. This is highlighted when we finally meet Kurtz who turns out to be a hollow sickly figure physically and morally despite his accolades. This is contrasted with Marlowe, who possess some depth of character, and survives the ordeal albeit a changed man.

Succinctly, the story presages a modern tenet of psychology which states that relocating physically does little to improve your mental state since the latter is taken with you. In fact, it may exacerbate the situation when all social norms are discarded unbridling your deepest darkest desires.

Conrad also uses the story to comment on materialism and it's corrupting influence on one's soul replacing character development with material acquisition. This is symbolized by describing London as the land of the living dead.

A fantastic compact psychological thriller we all can relate to.