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| Heart of Darkness | 
 enlarge | Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: Prestwick House Inc.
Category: Book
Buy New: $3.99
New (5) Used (9) from $3.95
Avg. Customer Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 10787
Media: Paperback
Pages: 80
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 6 x 0.2
ISBN: 1580495753
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781580495752
ASIN: 1580495753
Publication Date: September 2004
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Product Description
Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness was first published in 1899 in serial form in Londons Blackwoods Magazine. Loosely based on Conrads firsthand experience of rescuing a company agent from a remote station in the heart of the Congo, the novel is considered a literary bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With its modern literary approach to questions such as the ambiguous nature of good and evil, the novel foreshadows many of the themes and techniques that define modern literature. This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Edition includes a glossary and readers notes to help the modern reader contend with Conrads complex approach to the human condition.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 No fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil. Inconsequential story by another Marlow (Charlie) July 13, 2008
24 out of 26 found this review helpful
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.
Spell-binding, Great writing, Teens have trouble December 19, 2006
10 out of 12 found this review helpful
I found this very short novel spell-binding, but I am disappointed that many young readers find it boring. I think young readers have trouble with long sentences, having been raised on TV and video games.
Here's a sample: "The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and rip with steam."
The story involves a river boat captain going up the Congo River for a colonial Belgian company. The work is boring and dangerous. The captain meets an ivory trader with a magnetic personality (Kurtz). The story revolves around Kurtz and the corruption of the colonial system of exploiting Africa. The narrator returns to England to tell the story of his survival.
This book hardly qualifies as a novel: my copy is only 72 pages long. I would think that students would like the short page count. Instead, they react to the slow-moving story and well-developed description and internal monologue.
Here's a sample where the boat captain narrator describes Kurtz: "He had the power to charm or frighten rudimentary souls into an aggravated witch dance in his honor; he could also fill the small souls of the piilgrims with bitter misgivings; he had one devoted friend at least, and he had conquered one soul in the world that was neither rudimentary nor tainted with self-seeking."
I found the story very interesting and the language truly exceptional.
 Heart of Darkness review January 22, 2006
8 out of 15 found this review helpful
The Heart of Darkness is a book for a more advanced reader. There is about 5 times more happening than is actually written. In order to interpret all of this information, you must read between the lines. If you are not the type of reader who enjoys reading for long periods of time, going back to preceding paragraphs, then this is not the type of book to read for your individual needs.
Heart Of Darkness January 31, 2007
6 out of 7 found this review helpful
Heart Of Darkness Book Review
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a novel based on him. The book is absolutely amazing. The story is being told of Marlow who travels up the River Congo into the heart of the African Continent, at the height of European colonialism. Throughout the journey Marlow suffers a profound transformation on his out look into human nature, taking him into the darkness. He holds views of African continents, describing the natives with contempt. His prejudices are not able to remain indifferent to the cruelty and horrors of colonization.
Marlow becomes obsessed by his goal to meet Kurtz. Kurtz is a mystical character who has become famous for his success finding an enormous amount of ivory. Deep inside Marlow holds the hope that Kurtz will be able to give him a logical, justification for the horrors he has seen. When they meet, Marlow finds Kurtz has become a savage himself and has lost ties to any moral standard. He has plunged himself into insanity and horror. This book is a very suspenseful. I guarantee you that you will be on the edge of you seat reading this book. It is very deep, and can be interrupted in many different ways. So if you get a chance you should definitely read this book.
~Chris
"Mistah Kurtz--he dead." An influential work on five 20th century seminal works October 20, 2007
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
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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