This is one of those books that is in the culture so deeply that you tend to feel like you've read it already, but reading it remains a different experience altogether. I was impressed by the language and the flow of the story. It really does get under your skin. ( )

So, I get it, I really do. How greed and pride destroyed a man from the inside, out. How even the “savages” had more control over themselves than these men who invaded their land for fame and fortune. But the writing style was a struggle. If Conrad could have just separated the dialogue outI would have given this another star. It did take me a little to get into the story but once I did, I enjoyed it. I definitely sympathized at the end with Marlow. At 72 pages, I’m not mad I read it. ( )

Here's one of those works traditionally considered a classic that I'd managed to not read until fairly late in life. I was surprised, by the way, at how short it is: only 72 pages in the Dover Thrift edition I have.

I can see where the supposed classic status comes from. Conrad's writing is incredibly evocative. As for what it's evocative of... Well, it's certainly an interesting thing to read this here in the 21st century, on the other side of the colonial era. It is, as they say, very much Of Its Time, but in a complicated way that I find worth pondering. Conrad is writing about the absurdity, the inhumanity, and, yes, the horror of Europeans' exploitation of Africa. He's also writing that criticism very much from inside the cultural framework that produced those horrors, which means that there's an incredibly limited effort and an even more limited ability to imagine what things look like from other perspectives. It also means a preoccupation with ideas of "civilization" and "savagery" that seem, now, to be quite simplistic and wrongheaded, but which are explored here in a complex way that gives a genuinely interesting window onto the thoughts and fears surrounding these ideas at the time. And, yeah, let's not mince words: it's super racist. I mean, by the standards of the time, even the repeated insistence that the Africans in the story are completely human may have been unusual, but, y'know, one kinda wants to set the bar higher than that. In my mind, though, the value of reading this doesn't lie in the way it lets us pat ourselves on the back for being more enlightened, but in getting this rather dark and tortured glimpse into that past and into what it looked like to someone who, despite all that comparative lack of enlightenment, was still horrified by it.

I'm not sure if I've expressed any of that very well. I also feel like I ought to have a lot more intelligent things to say about the story and the writing, and especially about the character of Mr. Kurtz. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure what to make of the character of Mr. Kurtz. He's not exactly what I was expecting from what I'd osmosed about this piece of writing, either. If nothing else, I was expecting there to be... more of him.

Rating: I'm going to call this 4/5, for the writing, and for how worthwhile it is from a cultural and historical perspective, but, y'know, take that with all the appropriate caveats. ( )

Adversity

I don't really get the hoo-hah of 'Heart of Darkness' (or whether that's the right spelling of hoo-hah). Is this not just a tale of an apprehensive man in an unfamiliar land who journeys the Congo to retrieve a supposedly revered second man, who actually turns out to be not all-that impressive but instead solipsistic and plagued by a manic lust for Ivory? Then, for reasons unbeknownst to me, the protagonist returns hell bent on preserving the good name of this deified 'Kurtz' (who pops his clogs soon after his retrieval) without any great reason to. Was it purely due to the empathy he shared of the suffocating wilderness?

I don't know, allegory along with the book seems very overrated: there are only so many cluttered, wordy sentences I can take about a river, a jungle and the dark and it certainly didn't inspire me to think about any darkness within myself; perhaps I need a 'lighter' read. Ha. ( )