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Summary: Kooky Captain Kurtz
Review: Conrad takes us deep into the mind of the insane Kurtz who is being rescued by Marlowe. Away from society, Kurtz has become a sort of savage. Overwhelmed by his newly found, self created sense of power, we find that he turns out to be the exact opposite of the highly intelligent, well respected man Marlowe had expected to find. We are forced to see that danger, "the horror" lies within each and every human being, and if not contained this horror gets the best of us, making it impossible to better ourselves
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Summary: A Fine Piece of Literature
Review: This is an excellent read. It is short, concise, and relatively easy to follow. Conrad creates Kurtz and Marlow with such detail that it is hard to confine either to the stereotypes that they might represent. This is a must read for anyone interested in a timeless tale of the oppression of one people by another.
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Summary: Great book about the heart of mankind
Review: Joseph Conrad did a great job on this novella. He effectively portrays the true darkness lurking in everyone. His "stream of consciousness" writing with its long, descriptive paragraphs may be quite imposing at first glance, but they are quite masterfully written. The storyline of this novel (Marlow's search for the "great" Kurtz)is nothing less than greatness. Conrad's use of symbolism adds quite an extra dimension to the book. The only reason I haven't given this book 5 stars is because of its sometimes too excessive ambiguity. If you're looking for a great read that is not too long, this is the right book.
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Summary: A metaphor for life
Review: I read this book for the first time years ago while traveling through Asia, bumping my way along cragged roads and 3rd world squallar. It felt like going up the river. When I returned I was stumped by how oblivious, care free, and confident everyone was in my home town. You mention the lives and the conditions under which others live in what constitutes the other 80% and it is scoffed at in the all empowered first world. Conrad's disconnection upon returning to England spoke to me. It is the same disconnection that a man returning from a harrowing war might feel upon returning to the hearth. There is a deep implication in the pages of Heart of Darkness. It rings to the effect of: The world is immense, and for the most part, in terrible shape, and that we are poorer in spirit, knowledge, and insight by not coming to terms with this broader reality.
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Summary: Not a Pretty Thing: A Beautiful Sound
Review: The "conquest of the earth," which is the exploitation of one people of color by another, "is not a pretty thing when you look into it." These words, among the first spoken by Marlowe, prepare us for the actual experience of seeing into the "truth of things," which for Marlowe and Kurtz will be "the horror." But Conrad's fable is far more than an exposing of colonizing ways. Marlowe makes it clear that the real horror exists within the human soul and that failure to recognize and enunciate its existence is the difference between being saved or damned in a world whose bright shining lies continually lead us astray.In reading the story the first time, it's probably best to go for "content," extracting as much plot and characterization as possible from Conrad's multi-layered, impressionistic narrative. Marlowe says his mission is to make us "see," perhaps the motivation for Coppola's film adaptation, "Apocalypse Now," which like Marlowe's narrative is hung on three stations that mark Marlowe's trip up the river, his journey into the heart of darkness. When reading the narrative a second time, ignore the plot as well as the "sights" Marlowe provides. Listen very hard to the words of Marlowe's narration. Notice the "tone." Marlowe will vary it, even in a single sentence, from amusing understatement to biting irony to sarcastic overstatement. When Marlowe encounters Kurtz, he finds less a visible human speciimen than a sound. And finally, in the last 5-6 pages of the novel, as Marlowe prepares to tell Kurtz' story to the'"Intended," the darkness will become so pronounced there is nothing left to see. It literally "screams" at Marlowe who, in spite of its injunction, can pronounce only a lie. For many readers of the book, as well as apparently Marlowe's listeners in the narrative, the story will amount to little more than a lie, or an impenetrable narrative of foggy incomprehensibility. Sadly, literary art this complex, challenging, and disturbing will rarely reach the "intended," the audience the author might wish to enlighten. But for the attentive listener who becomes caught up in Conrad's remarkable music, the sound of the "horror" will take up permanent residence in consciousness, resonating for an entire lifetime.
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Summary: Hints ending in a deep sigh.
Review: 'Heart of Darkness', the tale of a European seaman journeying up an African river, is a Chinese box of Chinese whispers. What perhaps strikes the first-time reader (like myself) first is the unbridgeable conflict between the work's apparent aim - the exposure of the barbaric reality behind the enlightenment propaganda of Imperialist bureaucracies - and its effect, a baffling nebulousness; this is matched by conflict between the prodigious exactness of Conrad's prose, and the vague thoughts, images, feelings, events it asks us to imagine. this sense of intangibility results primarily from the narration itself - Marlow's tale of the search for Kurtz is related to the reader by an intermediary narrator; it is told by a disembodied voice on a boat-trip one Thames night. Marlow's story is itself full of further removes, fragments of information pieced from stories, hints, unreliable statements and testimonies, paintings, myths, ciphers on books. the plot and its mechanics are always abstracted - the tangible trip up a geographical river becomes a journey back in time stripped of place-names or datemarks; an ambush takes place in a blinding fog; throughout, Marlow's ideas, equivocations, euphemisms, evasions and philosophical ruminations over what happens (specifically, what Kurtz has done) takes precedence over any concrete detail. The language constantly evokes dreams, nightmares, shades, phantoms - inanimate objects (such as abandoned machinery) become signs of desolating death, more articulate than the dead humans in similar positions. 'Heart' is usually seen as the first masterpiece of the 20th century and one of the key modernist texts, but, for me, its effect was similar to a much older literary genre, the Gothic, the 'horror, horror' story. The elaborate framing narrative devices; the emphasis on physical and mental deterioration; the doppelganger motif (Marlow and Kurtz echo each other throughout, not least as disembodied voices bewitching their listeners on boats), the intimations of the Satanic and 'I Walked with a Zombie' sacrifices-in-the-bush atmosphere; the move from 'enlightened, time-bound civilisation to barbaric, timeless primitivism; from a social order to a boundless nightmare. The African landscape is shaped by references to key Western texts of the supernatural, from Virgil to Dante to Perrault. Conrad follows his master Henry James' lead here, using verbal precision to articulate an unidentified and unidentifiable black hole, and 'Heart' is, along with 'the Turn of the Screw', the scariest, dread-freezing book I have ever read. Like the Gothic, therefore, Conrad is not simply concerned with the unpalatable realities of a particular political system, but the individual unfathomabilities that allow them to happen; if we feel this somehow cheats the critique by obscuring it, than, a century of 'the horror' later, can we say we are any more articulate than Marlow? (Of all the editions of 'Heart' available, I would recommend two, both, curiously, published by Penguin in 1995. that by John Lyon, returns the novella to its original book-form, as the second of a trilogy including 'Youth' and 'The end of the tether'; his introduction brilliantly analyses the formal minutae of Conrad's art, its structures and details, the way the difficult demands it makes on the reader provoke the story's themes, effect and meaning. That by Robert Hampson, which reproduces Conrad's 'Congo Diary' of the 1890 trip that partly inspired the novella, places 'Heart' in its original context, the culmination of 19th century European expansion in Africa, with its attendant justifications and anxieties, including among the many prototypes for Kurtz, H M Stanley (of '...and Livingstone' fame), an aggressive, murderous, capitalistic imperialist. he convincingly defends 'Heart', a text much vilified by post-colonial and feminist critics from charges of collusive racism and misogyny, reminding us not to confuse a writer with his hero, demonstrating the devices employed by Conrad to distanciate the two).
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Summary: One of my all-time favorites
Review: I read this book in anticipation of seeing the new screen version of "Apocalypse Now" after hearing that this novella served as the moral foundation for the movie. The story documents the philosophy that in order for a good man to conquer or overcome evil, he himself must become evil. This book ties in so very well with the moral and philosophical positions and issues the US Government has to address and take into consideration (...). Conrad is a phenomally gifted author whose stories serve to consider and address the various moral and philosophical issues man is so often confronted with. Heart of Darkness is a powerful and well-written observation on the battle of good versus evil within man's conscience.
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Summary: Unspeakable Rites
Review: Conrad's expose of colonial excesses in the Congo burst upon the literary scene in the late c. 19th and remains one of the great explorations of humanity's, or more properly man's, folly. For this is very much a book about the peculiarities of the male psyche: in Kurtz we find the apotheosis of the power-junkie. I always feel that one of the peculiar narrative strengths of Conrad is that he is writing in his second-language, and is therefore at pains to ensure that his words have precision. Other unforgettable elements in HOD include an early scene in the Brussels company HQ where Marlow passes two older women knitting in the corridor (an ancient harbinger of doom; also used to great effect by Dickens in "Tale of Two Cities"); the gunboat shelling an empty jungle (perhaps the one element of HOD that translated totally seamlessly into the film "Apocalpyse Now," where the gunboat turns into that fighter-bomber carrying "napalm in the morning"); and the riverside skeletons whose ribs are grown through by elephant grass.
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Summary: Into the Shadows
Review: "Not a very enthralling book; but at the first glance you could see there a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work, which made these humble pages, thought out so many years ago, luminous with another than a professional light."
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Summary: Text book European colonization
Review: The book is hearld by many people as being a great work ,and it is in it's own right. I read this book and it has many qualities that european males find model behavior. The book is a great model for such people as King Leopold to just murder and kill over Five million Congolese with no remorse. The ideal thinking since these people throw spears.live in mud huts and have never achieved the things we have they don't deserve to breathe and walk the earth. The people have no emotions or state of awareness. The Europeans didn't realize that these people in the furture might have something to offer. This book in my opinion is a disguise for profaganda colonization and a justification. The very inaccurate thing in this book is the description of cannibalism which has never been proven other than overzealous missionary accounts to exist in Zaire. The book reminds of every thing the Europeans value,and that is murder,destruction,and dominance over other people. The real twist to this story is that the Belgium KIng Leopold was the real savage. He had African skulls laying around his castle as if it was a real big trophy and had regular incidents or murder fests where he would go into villages and kill helpless Bantus. The europeans have never cared about African people or their side of their story,they just put out novels and disguise them as classics to brainwash the general public. I recommend if you read this book,to take the time and read King Leopold's Ghost. You wil disocver the truth behind this novel and it's motive.
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