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Liked It “Very well written and good insight into the human psyche.” see full review » see other reviews » |
Didn’t Like It “My rating is based on how I feel--I hated the book. However, I can remove my personal hatred and be the English teacher I am and say that this is an extremely well-written post-colonial novel depicting complex characterization and explores the darker side of the human condition” see full review » see other reviews » |
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“Very well written and good insight into the human psyche.”
Mike R wrote this review Wednesday, November 18 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“I really enjoyed this book after reading a few chapters. Conrad really showed how people react when society is thrust upon them or taken away. Since his book was written after personal experiences, you really have a feel for the narration and his description of the cannibals control is mind boggling.”
Samantha C wrote this review Monday, November 16 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“complex language but i loved the symbolism and the descent! ”
Lana C wrote this review Sunday, August 23 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I did not enjoy this book when I first read it, but a few years later when I re-read it and studied it more in-depth, I realized how great it is and what a talented author Conrad was. Literally every word in this book means something, which makes the novel very intense, dense, and challenging to read. That's not a bad thing, but it's something that the reader needs to be aware of before beginning the novel. This is not a novel that one reads for pleasure; it is a novel that one reads to learn about the effects of colonization and ALL people involved with it. ”
Ginny W wrote this review Friday, August 7 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
0 of 1 members found this review helpful“Read it in college and don't remember much about it. Do recall the professor using a good bit of "Apocalypse Now" to help us understand it.”
Doug H wrote this review Friday, August 7 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No“My rating is based on how I feel--I hated the book. However, I can remove my personal hatred and be the English teacher I am and say that this is an extremely well-written post-colonial novel depicting complex characterization and explores the darker side of the human condition”
Jaclyn O'Hara wrote this review Friday, July 17 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“it's awesome. you should read it. if you dont like it youre a douche.”
TJ H wrote this review Saturday, July 11 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“I need to read this book again, without the liberal bias of Dr. Poff, my Senior high school English teacher who just liberalized this book to heck and gone and made me sick of it. "The horror!"”
Grant H wrote this review Thursday, May 28 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
“(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted here ilegally.)
jasonpettus wrote this review Tuesday, May 5 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
The CCLaP 100: In which I read a hundred so-called "classics" for the first time, then opine on whether or not they deserve the label. Heart of Darkness is book #28 of this essay series.
The story in a nutshell:
The literal plotline of Joseph Conrad's 1902 novella Heart of Darkness (first published serially in 1899) is actually pretty simple: It's the story of a sailor named Marlow, who is hired by one of those Victorian-Age northern European trading companies to captain a boat up and down the Congo River in Africa, transporting company ivory to eventually be shipped back north; and while there, he is also to quietly recall their man Kurtz out in the middle of the jungle, the biggest ivory-gatherer in the company's history but who has recently been displaying a whole series of erratic behavior that's had his superiors more and more nervous (including not communicating for months at a time, rumors that he has started his own religion among the local villagers, and more). Ah, but it's when he actually gets to the Congo that this story turns a lot more complex; because far from being the civilizing presence the Empire-era British were touted back home as being in such backwater jungles, Marlow quickly realizes that it is the white people in Africa causing the majority of the problems, with a series of company stations along the river that get crazier and more abusive the farther inward that he and his mixed-race crew travel.
Once finally reaching Kurtz, then, after a series of surreal and darkly absurdist experiences, Marlow comes to realize the secret to the legitimately brilliant yet absolutely insane man's almost supernatural ability to gather ivory: namely, he has completely given up on the idea that Brits are in any way more civilized than the cannibals surrounding them, and has used Caucasian technology (steamboat whistles, etc) to install himself as an all-powerful god in their eyes, convincing them to wage bloody jihads against their neighbors and simply take all the ivory the other tribes have gathered over the years. And so as he makes his way back home with the raving, soon-to-be-dead Kurtz now on his boat, Marlow is left to wonder about the false veneer of 'polite society' that the British have so elaborately created for themselves, and to ponder whether it ultimately does a lot more harm to the world at large than good.
The argument for it being a classic:
There are so many ways that Heart of Darkness can be considered a classic, argue its fans, that it's hard to know where to even start. There's the obvious, to begin with, that this was one of the first projects ever by a white male to be critical of the then-all-powerful British Empire, paving the way at the turn of the 20th century for the growing anti-imperial sentiments that were to come; and then there's his surprisingly sophisticated look at race, his embrace of the then-new field of psychology, the way he almost perfectly combines character and plot development into a legitimately thrilling potboiler. But even more important than all this, many say, Conrad was one of the heroes of an extremely important yet unsung age for the Western arts, and this novella an exquisite example of that age -- namely, the twenty-year period between the death of Queen Victoria and the end of World War One (1900 to 1920, in other words), when a series of daring and ultra-intelligent artists literally pulled the world kicking and screaming out of Victorianism and into the heady atmosphere of Modernism.
If it wasn't for books like these, argue its fans, ones that gently primed Western audiences to think of literature in much more complex and challenging ways, such next-generation artists as William Faulkner and Henry Miller would've fallen flat on their faces; and if not for these transitional artists embracing such concepts as moral relativism, our modern world of the arts today might still only consist of simplistic Victorian morality tales, where baddies literally wear black hats and go around twirling their mustaches in an evil manner. (Of course, there are some who argue that this rejection of the notion of absolute good and absolute evil is what directly led to the rise of fascism, which first started rearing its ugly head a mere twenty years after this book was first published; but that's a heated argument for another day.) These transitional artists may get short shrift nowadays, say their fans, but we actually owe the entire flavor of the contemporary arts to their groundbreaking work; and by being one of the best examples of that period, they argue, Heart of Darkness of course deserves the label of classic.
The argument against:
Of course, much like other artists of this period (see my review of The Man Who Was Thursday, for example), this entire argument can be turned on its head; that the works of this period are simply too obscure to be known as classics, simply too overshadowed by the Early Modernist masterpieces that came just a generation later. For example, critics argue, if not for the notorious adaptation of this story by Francis Ford Coppola into the 1979 Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now, few people these days would even know of Joseph Conrad's existence; and while the novella may still remain a well-done and powerful tale (and I've come across few people online who argue otherwise), such obscurity simply does not justify a 'classic' status.
My verdict:
So since its shadow does loom so largely over this book, let's go ahead and directly address Coppola's much more well-known Apocalypse Now; because now that I've read the book, I've come to realize that the movie is not just an adaptation of the original public-domain story but a literal beat-for-beat ripoff, all the way down down to such modern-seeming subversive details as the Dennis Hopper character (an insane, drug-addicted fellow white male who lives out in the jungle with Kurtz, and worships him just like the local villagers do). And this is remarkable, that a book over a hundred years old would contain so many touches we usually associate with postmodernism; because to put it in perspective, keep in mind that this was written the same year as Bram Stoker's Dracula, within an age just in general where narrative literature mostly consisted of flowery simplistic fairytales. Or to use another example, look at all the ways this story has been interpreted over the years -- as a cautionary tale about the limits of empire, as a prescient look at race relations, as an examination of the secret black pit inside every human soul (and the pretty little lies called 'civilization' we tell ourselves to keep this black pit in check), as a simple historical tale based on Conrad's own experiences in the Congo; and now consider that at the time this book came out, most people found the entire concept of artistically analyzing a narrative fictional story to be ridiculous, kinda like how most people these days would find it ridiculous to examine the socio-religious subtext of a first-person-shooter videogame. It was writers like Conrad and books like Heart of Darkness that first started changing the public's mind about the artistic worth of long-form fiction; and as regular readers know, I have a soft spot in my heart for daring experimenters from transitional periods of artistic history, so of course I'm going to eat this novella up like the heavenly manna it is. I encourage everyone to check out not only this book but all the forgotten trailblazers of the early 20th century; it's a period of the arts that deserves to be better known and appreciated, especially here during its centennial anniversary.
Is it a classic? Yes”“Never has my mind wandered so insistently as when I was trying to focus on reading this book. Every page or so a really neat observation of Marlow's would catch my attention, so I have a few lines of this book memorized but I don't think I would even know the plot of it if my lit teacher hadn't spoon-fed it to me. It's a good book in theory but my experience with it was nothing special.”
Carrie H wrote this review Monday, April 20 2009. ( reply | permalink ) Was this review helpful? Yes | No
