Horror awaits Charlie Marlow, a seaman assigned by an ivory company to retrieve a cargo boat along with one of its employees, Mr. Kurtz, who is stranded deep in the heart of the Belgian Congo. Marlow's journey up the brooding dark river soon becomes a struggle to maintain his own sanity as he witnesses the brutalization of the natives by white traders and then discovers the enigmatic Mr. Kurtz. Kurtz, once a genius and the company's most successful representative, has become a savage; his compound is decorated by a row of human heads mounted on spears. It soon becomes clear that the demonic mastermind, liberated from the conventions of European culture, has traded his soul to become ruler of his own horrific dominion.Acclaimed to be one of the great, albeit disturbing, visionary works of western civilization, Joseph Conrad's haunting tale dramatizes the stark realities of Africa in the colonial period. Heart of Darkness reflects the physical and psychological tragedies that Conrad had experienced while working in the Belgian Congo in 1890. It is also the basis of Francis Ford Coppola's Academy Award–winning film Apocalypse Now.
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Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born in 1857 in the Russian part of Poland. His parents were punished for their Polish nationalist activities, and the family was exiled to northern Russia. At age twelve, after both of his parents had died of tuberculosis, Conrad was sent to live with his uncle in Switzerland. During his youth he attended schools in Krakow, was involved in arms smuggling for the Carlist cause in Spain, and joined the French merchant marine. Conrad continued his naval career for sixteen years in the British merchant navy, and in 1886, he commanded his own ship, the Otago. In that same year, he became a British citizen and changed his name to Joseph Conrad.Conrad sailed to many parts of the world, including Australia, the West Indies, South America, and the Congo River. It was during theses long journeys that he started to write. At age thirty-six, Conrad ended his sea career, devoted himself entirely to literature, and settled in England. Two years later, he married an Englishwoman, by whom he had two sons. Despite the immediate critical recognition of his major novels, they did not sell well. The family lived in relative poverty until the commercial success of Chance in 1913. Having finally received acclaim, he was offered a knighthood in 1923, which he declined. Conrad died of a heart attack one year later.Conrad crystallized his often quoted goal as a writer: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel---it is, above all, to make you see. That---and no more, and it is everything."Conrad's works of extreme subtlety, sophistication, and technical complexities---and the unprecedented way in which he communicates a pessimist's view of man's personal and social destiny---established him as one of the first English "modernists." Critics consider him to be the single most important innovator of twentieth-century literature.Many of Conrad's novels drew material, events, and personalities from his own experiences in different parts of the world. His most popular works are Heart of Darkness (influenced by his journey up the Congo River, where he learned about atrocities made by Congo "explorers"), Lord Jim (drawn from his career in the British navy), and Nostromo. Conrad's novels had a significant impact on other twentieth-century writers, including Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Sartre, and Greene. Several of Conrad's stories have been made into films, most notably Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, based on Heart of Darkness, and Alfred Hitchcock's The Sabotage, based on The Secret Agent. Scott Brick has recorded over five hundred audiobooks, has won over forty AudioFile Earphones Awards, and has twice received Audie Awards for his work on the Dune series. He has been proclaimed both a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine and Publishers Weekly's 2007 Narrator of the Year. Scott has recorded Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive, Whipping Star, The Dragon in the Sea, and The White Plague for Tantor Audio.
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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, with eBook (Audio CD)
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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