Heart of Darkness

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Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

Literature

Aug 10, 2018

In the course of roughly a hundred pages, Heart of Darkness will journey, with a strangely leisurely intensity, into realms of depravity best encoded in the dying cry of Kurtz, the delusional, despicable character at its enigmatic core: “The horror! The horror!” Although this extraordinarily concentrated work has been hailed, denounced, and hailed all over again for its attitudes about race and colonialism, an exact interpretation of its themes remains unsettlingly elusive. Like a distillation of the longer fiction that Conrad would write in its wake, this gripping and groundbreaking novella, despite its powerful dramatic arc, is profoundly, almost creepily unresolved.

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Steve Jump

Dec 2, 2018

You may want to see "Apocalypse Now" first.

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Alice Hutchinson

Jan 10, 2019

So tough and so well written.

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Margaret Bailey

Feb 9, 2019

I thought for sure I'd hate this, given the racist language and the locale, which doesn't interest me. Instead, it was wonderful. A British man, yachting with friends on the Thames, tells them of a time when he took a job running a rundown boat up the Congo River. The central character to his mind is Kurtz (the character played by Marlon Brando in the film adaptation, "Apocalypse Now"), but to me it was the land and the narrator's reaction to his surroundings. There is a marvelous discourse early on about sailors being basically homebodies, because wherever they go their home is with them and they rarely leave it. And then there are his observations on the cannibals he hires to run the boat - as opposed to the whites on the boat, whom he thinks stupid and incomprehensible. And, of course, there are the words he hears on a dying man's lips: "The horror! The horror!". Just brilliant writing.

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