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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent edition of classic novel, May 21, 2007
This review is from: Heart of Darkness & Selections from The Congo Diary (Paperback)
Published in 1899, Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS is like a fingerpost for its time, pointing the way of human preoccupations as they probed the final frontiers left in the world to discover, both geographically and intrapersonally, equipped only with a 19th century worldview. Where fear and discomfort with the unknown had once been associated with leaving land and heading into the open sea, Conrad now placed it in turning inward, turning from the sea up a river that penetrates an unknown land.
This is the story related one night to a group of London dwellers gathered on a dock boat in the safety and familiarity of the Thames. The speaker, a garrulous veteran seaman named Marlow, remembers how as a younger man he had pushed for the adventurous assignment of taking a steamboat up the Congo in search of a company's missing agent, Kurtz. His is a tale of horror, of what can happen to a person disengaged from civilization as it is known. This is an atmospheric exploration of knowledge, experience, innocence and morality. Conrad's language is complex but not opaque, has action but also a lot of description. As Virginia Woolf once said, Conrad could not write badly to save his own life.
That his vision requires rooting the horror in a hostile jungle culture and its customs can present a problem for a contemporary audience. The Modern Library has done a good job in introducing this edition with notable criticism, positive and negative, excerpted from across the 20th century, including pieces by Mencken, Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster and, more recently, Chinua Achebe. This edition also includes passages from Conrad's 1890 journal when he was traveling in the Congo. Several different publishers are publishing this novel, but this edition is the best I found.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Mistah Kurtz--he dead." An influential work on five 20th century seminal works, October 20, 2007
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.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
REALITY INTO FICTION, November 6, 2000
This review is from: Heart of Darkness & Selections from The Congo Diary (Paperback)
Joseph Conrad is NOT for everyone! So many people have had their attention-span shortened by MTV, Television and the Disney version of the TITANIC (hint... the boat doesn't sink and everybody erupts in a unrecorded song from MARY POPPINS), that people have forgotten how great it is to read a well written book with piercing insite,memorable characters, and a haunting theme. The skill of the true wordsmith has thanklessly fallen by the wayside, evidenced by the fact that Stephen King is considered a literary genius (see H.P. Lovecraft for a true genius in both word and plot). If we were to turn off the electronics and allow our pure powers of imagination to work, then Conrad would be abundant treat to our senses. All of his books are fantastic, but HEART OF DARKNESS holds a special fascination for most people who read it. Not to digress, but the Turner Production of "Heart of Darkness" with Tim Roth is very good and I have always loved "Apocolypse Now" (saw it 15 times in the theater). The story is a journey of the soul, as much as it is pure adventure. It is a wake-up call for those who have forgotten what it is to care and become aware of how their lives move forward (and sometimes don't). The setting of a forgotten Africa, wedged and pierced by European superpowers is both mysterious and frightening. We see this now-lost land through the eyes of a naive man, not grounded nor necessarily wise in the ways of the world. The opening reference of the French warship bombarding the forrested coasts shows the overall blindness of the countries who seek to reap the wealth of the land's bounty... throwing artillery shells onto the coast and cannot see if they are hitting anything! The river and its trading stations connect the European desire for money and profit and the harsh reality of the Africa they cannot explain. The mission is to reach the elusive Kurtz, a brilliant mind and man who has been silenced. Now the Naive agent seeks the worldly-wise man who Africa has driven mad! What I loved about the journey is Conrad's ability to chronicle not only the countryside but the people who are drawn into this lust for ivory and money. In this case, the journey is the deal. What this edition gives us is a wonderful addition... Conrad's real-life experiences as the short-lived captain of a steam boat in the Congo. At the time, Conrad considered himself more of a sailor than a novelist, and his notations reflect the factual and relatively dull specifics of his duties. Still, one gets an acute sense of how his mind works and (later) how he turned these terse, and unexciting notes into possibly one of the greatest short stories in the history of the English Language. HEART OF DARKNESS can be a matter of patience. It does not move quickly, in places, but if one slows down and allows the story to stimulate, and inform, then it is time well spent! There is time for video stimulation (TV, VHS, etc) and there is time to find an overstuffed chair and allow the best film maker ever made, your own mind, to transport you to a place long burned away by commercial interests and "progress". Take the journey and let your soul speak back to you afterwards!
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