Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
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Book Summary Information
Author: Joseph ConradEdition: Paperback
Published: 2004-09
ISBN: 1580495753
Number of pages: 80
Publisher: Prestwick House Inc.
Book Reviews of Heart of Darkness
Book Review: No fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil. Inconsequential story by another Marlow (Charlie)
Summary: 5 Stars
I was motivated to re-visit Conrad's early masterpiece by Sebald's Walk in Suffolk, which contains a bio chapter on Conrad with emphasis on his Congo experience, which was a traumatic one. Conrad had taken up the job of a skipper of a river steamboat, but he quit after a short time, in disgust with the colonial practices of the Belgians and their crude exploitation methods.
Marlow is Conrad's alter ego here, a captain who tells his story to some other guests at a dinner party. The party takes place on a ship in the Thames estuary around the turn of the 19th century. An initial narrator gives us the frame of the five men coming together for a chat and a drink and dinner. Marlow then takes over and tells us 'one of his inconsequential stories', as the introducer expects with some sarcasm: how he got the Congo job and went there with curiosity. He is appalled from the start by the crude colonialist violence that he observes on the African West Coast and then in the Congo territory itself, and by the raw greed of the colonialists. Kurtz of course, the main protagonist of Marlow's tale, who has not much of a 'life' role to play in the story, stands for the fallen white man, the one whose character cracked and who gave in to temptations and demons, his personal ones and from the world around him. He had the reputation of being a superior specimen, a man with morality and efficiency. The 'heart of darkness' is an ambiguous place and title. It can mean the center of the unknown inner Africa, but it also means the soul of the fallen man.(Kurtz is best known with the face of Marlon Brando and the whispered words: the horror! the horror! But Apocalypse Now transformed the story from Congo colonialism into Indochina war cruelty.)
Marlow's attitude is ambiguous, he thinks like a benevolent white man with an essentially racist attitude himself, but with a more 'humane' approach. He is realistic about imperialism: the conquest of the earth means mostly the taking it away from those who have a different complexion and flatter noses. He even takes history with a broader sweep: looking over the Thames at sunset towards the 'monster' city he is reminded of the times when this was a dark place for the invading Roman army.
The book is written in a remarkably opaque language. One struggles with every single sentence just to follow the story line. This is unfortunate, I am sure a more straightforward narrative technique would have opened a broader audience for the subject.
Conrad was a man who produced stunning visual effects of the mind with his inventions, but he was not a chief engineer of narrative simplicity. If one is looking for a good straightforward narrative, this is not it. If one is willing to take up the struggle, one is rewarded though. One has to wrestle meaning out of his writing, it is not a walk in the park. The style is highly contextual, every sentence implies worlds and assumes you know which ones. At the same time, he is also able to come up with pretty gems of sentences like when Marlow describes his steamboat: she rang under my feet like an empty biscuit tin, but she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape.
In line with the frame narrator's low expectations for Marlow's story, half of the audience is asleep by half way. I was not.
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