JOSEPH CONRAD (1857-1924) was one of the most remarkable figures in English literature. Born in Poland, and originally named Josef Teodor Konrad Walecz Korzeniowski, he went to sea at the age of seventeen and eventually joined the crew of an English vessel, becoming a British citizen in the process. He retired from the sea in 1894 and took up the pen, writing all his works in English, a language he had only learned as an adult. Despite this, he was a master stylist, both lush and precise. His outsider's eye gave him special insights into the moral dangers of the great age of European empires. The book you hold in your hands -- Conrad's immortal HEART OF DARKNESS -- was the basis for the renowned film, APOCALYPSE NOW.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Darkest Depths Of Humanity,
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This review is from: Heart of Darkness (Hardcover)
Conrad's language is impeccable. He writes in a crisp, precise and succinct manner. And this novella is perhaps one of his grandest works. It served as the backbone of the plot of "Apocalypse Now." This epic Oliver Stone movie about Viet Nam was fully adapted from Conrad's tale.
The book is highly autobiographical. Conrad was a river boat captain in the Congo during the time that the area was being highly exploited for its Ivory. He observed cruelties and horrors that were not fully comprehendible by modern man. He endured sickness and hardship; which ultimately destroyed his health to the point that he had to give up his river runs in the Congo. But his memories and his hatred of what he saw was intact. In Heart of Darkness Conrad describes a man who has looked deeply into his soul. This deep introspection and understanding into the deepest depths of human depravity had been seen by Mr. Kurtz. He had looked at them with eyes wide open and integrated the most horrible of humanity into his experience. The book drips with references to death. Yet the references are not superfluous. The book shows the horror of the exploitation of the Europeans. They did all and more than the Americans did in the era of slavery. The cruelest of cruelty. The most abominable conditions. The death and destruction. All of it was present in the Congo as well. And Conrad saw it, up close and personal. The book is truly a classic. It is nice to have a hard cover edition around. It is recommended to all serious readers of English and American literature.
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Mistah Kurtz--he dead." An influential work on five 20th century seminal works,
This review is from: Heart of Darkness (Hardcover)
I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.
Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream. Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57). I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness! As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
I wanted to rip this book to pieces!,
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This review is from: Heart of Darkness (Hardcover)
Ok, so I usually give books a chance, even if they are a class assignment but this book just made me aggravated. I mean it seems to enforce the strategy of using 40 words when 1 will do and just goes on and on and on. I mean I know that this book is classic and Conrad is an acquired taste but I just couldn't stand having to get through it. The only reason I was able to finish it at all was because I had the flu and was half delirious so I wasn't paying attention to what I was reading anyways (although this was only for the last 50 pages of it and my edition had like 180 pages). Anyways, I understand this is supposed to be a classic. It just isn't my taste.
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