Customer Reviews

Heart of Darkness & Selections from The Congo Diary

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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!

Just as described. Perfect condition and arrived within the estimated time frame. Will shop again from this buyer. Very satisfied customer.

This is definitely a book that a person should read. Its all about your own inferences as to what the main point of the book was. For me it was about how the wild can change a person. Its basically about a guy named Marlow and he tells the story of a guy named Kurtz. Kurtz is this "remarkable" person and everyone seems to know about him and what type of person he is. It amazes me how much people admired this guy.

I really enjoyed the way that the jungle was portrayed. It was like its own character. I would also have a dictionary along side you as you are reading. There are a lot of big words and words that we already know that have multiple meanings. Other than that it was interesting and something different.

Conrad is among the most influential writers of our time, and his masterwork Heart of Darkness proves this. The concepts introduced in this book laid the groudwork for a new outlook on humanity, and his predictions to modern society, specifically the business world, are unparalleled. Read this book and it will give you a new view on the world.

This book is a classic. Do not stray from that opinion. However, it is full of much detail, at times excess description. This does lead to some difficulty in following the story line. It certainly is a unique way of telling a story, a different type of narrative. I would recomend it to someone looking for a challange, but to that High School student deciding to read this book because it is the shortest on the list, I'd think again. The details will make you spend more time re-reading and summarizing than it would to read a longer, easier read novel.

I've re-read this I know not how many times, but it truly remains one of my favorite "classics." This journey through the Congo (and, in turn, through the protagonist's mind) is not only well written, but it truly draws the reader into the delusional stages of consciousness. It is worth every moment.

Heart of Darkness is a novel focused with strong imagery and the concepts of darkness and light as "darkness" is the heart of man while the "light" can be civilization as a whole. I found this book somewhat discriminating in the beginning but as a whole it has a very clear statement. I can see how it is one of the greatest novels but to me Marlow, the main character, has no character as he becomes obsessed with Kurtz and can instantly become him but does not. After finding what he is looking for, Marlow is still filled with the darkness. Even though I thought this book was somewhat interesting, I would not recommend it because I did not agree with Marlow's or maybe even Conrad's view of the Congo jungle and life in it with the darkness.