Overall this was a good story. I have seen Francis Ford Coppola's 'Apocalypse Now' and the film follow's the book closely. The story begins with the main character, Marlowe, telling a story to his fellow companions. They are on a boat on the Thames waiting for the tide and he begins the story. Marlowe recounts how he took a job to go up the river and bring back a man named Kurtz, who was the manager of the Inner Station. But The Company is concerned Kurtz has gone insane and has begun operating on his own program. They have lost communication with the Inner Station and are getting reports of savagery up the far end of the river. The readers don't know why but he has become dangerous and a liability to The Company. Marlowe's narration of the river is almost spot on with Martin Sheen's gloomy narration from the movie.

"Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, the vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings.", pg. 38

"The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return.", pg. 40

'Exterminate the brutes.', pg. 57

And the outside Stranger, the one who worships Kurtz because he rambles things like "he's a genius" and "You don't talk with that Man—you listen", and "This man has enlarged my mind."

The book reflects European colonialism and stripping the land of resources (in this case ivory) in Africa during the 1800s. There is dehumanized labor, lack of human connection with the characters (there's no names—only references like the Russian, the Manager, the Accountant, The Company, the savages, etc.), and the uncertainty going up the river. Overall this was a decent story. The first-person narration can be hard to follow sometimes and felt like Marlow was rambling. I plan to read this again because I'm sure there is a lot I missed. Thanks!

Joseph Conrad seems to have known every nook and cranny of human soul… And this priceless knowledge made him one of the greatest innovators… And Heart of Darkness is simultaneously a polestar and milestone in the world literature.

But as I stood on this hillside, I foresaw that in the blinding sunshine of that land I would become acquainted with a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly. How insidious he could be, too, I was only to find out several months later and a thousand miles farther.

Darkness hates all the trespassers…

The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.

Darkness in the novel isn’t just the darkness of night and of animal instincts but it slowly becomes a symbol of the human nature itself…
Wash away the varnish of civilizing gloss off man and the darkness of heart will be revealed…

The vision seemed to enter the house with me – the stretcher, the phantom-bearers, the wild crowd of obedient worshippers, the gloom of the forests, the glitter of the reach between the murky bends, the beat of the drum, regular and muffled like the beating of a heart – the heart of a conquering darkness. It was a moment of triumph for the wilderness, an invading and vengeful rush which, it seemed to me, I would have to keep back alone for the salvation of another soul.

Darkness mercilessly destroys those who penetrate into its heart.

I must have picked this book up to read and put it down three times out of sheer boredom! By the fourth time I picked it back up and powered through somehow. What a tedious bore! Why this book is considered a classic is beyond me.

“We live in the flicker -- may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday.”

Marlow is not just a narrator or an alter ego of Conrad, but a universal everyman, timeless. And that, to me, is the greatest appeal of this book, it is timeless.

“Like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker.”

The scene of Marlow sitting Buddha like as the Thames dreams into slow darkness and his voice takes on a disembodied, spiritual cast is iconic and Conrad's vision of history repeating itself as wicked and despotic civilization "discovers" it's ancient cousin is a ubiquitous theme in Conrad's work and one that is masterfully created here. As the Britons and Picts were to the Romans, so to are the Africans to the Europeans and Conrad has demonstrated his timely message.

“They were conquerors, and for that you want only brute force--nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.”

A search for hidden meaning, a quest, mysteries solved and others unanswered, self realization and epiphany. Conrad winds it all up in this classic.

“The horror! The horror!”

***** 2018 re-read

I think there was a recent poll about what was the book you have re-read the most. No doubt for me, it’s this one, read it a couple times in HS, few times in college and innumerable times since. Looks like this is the third in the Goodreads era.

As a scholar I have to be concise and methodical, precisely citing and referencing to a given treatise or authority. When reading for pleasure, I’m much more intuitive, allowing my mind to wander and to muse and to collect abstract thoughts and make obscure connections as I read.

This time around I payed more attention to this story as it was written, a tale told in the gathering darkness near the mouth of the Thames, Marlow’s voice a disembodied narration spinning an account of a time before but one that is ageless nonetheless. The connection he makes between the Romans coming up the Thames and the Westerners traveling up the Congo is provocative and somber.

As always, this is a story about Kurtz and his voice, that eloquent but hollow voice in the darkness, a civilized man gone native, but more than that, a traveler shedding away the trappings of an enlightened age and looking into the abyss.

Whether the natives are dark skinned or white with blue tattoos, the image is the same and the message is all the more haunting.

On a short list of my favorites or all time, this may be my favorite.

*** 2022 reread

I recently rewatched Francis Ford Coppola’s brilliant 1979 film Apocalypse Now starring Marlon Brando and Martin Sheen and so decided it was past time to reread one of my all time favorite books. This is a short work, a novella really, so I should reread this annually.

This time I was confronted with the twin specters of a disembodied voice – the first, our narrator, Marlow, sitting Buddha like on the Thames estuary, the second Kurtz’ voice as remembered by Marlow – and it occurred to me that Conrad may have been alluding to the Gospel of John, as it begins “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” Here, Conrad describes for us a Voice, crying out in the wilderness (like John the Baptist) and the word “wilderness” is used frequently rather that the more accurate “jungle” as this is set in the Congo.

I also spent more time considering the end of the work, after Kurtz, when Marlow is back in Europe and his strange eulogy about the fallen man, “Mr. Kurtz, he dead”.

Kurtz was the product of Europe, “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz” and so Kurtz embodies the empirical lusts of the “crusading” Europeans in Africa (and historically to the Romans in ancient Britain) though Kurtz shrugs off the moralistic trappings of good intentions. Kurtz’s written statement, “Exterminate all the brutes” is evocative of his apocryphal dying declaration, “the horror”.

A must read.

Blessed was Odysseus, who returned, full of wisdom, after many conquests and adventures to live a peaceful old age with his wife and family. It didn’t go that well for Charles Marlow. Heart of Darkness is like The Odyssey or The Divine Comedy or the story of Sindbad or any hero’s journey for that matter, only upside down. Instead of an adventure that is ultimately a coming-of-age, a homecoming, a blessing, a regaining of paradise, Marlow’s expedition up the Congo River, in search of an illusory Eldorado, setting off “for the centre of the earth”, works as a step “into the gloomy circle of some Inferno”.

Conrad himself sailed up the Congo in his youth, so his novella is, in many ways, autobiographical. In the book, like Odysseus or Sindbad, Marlow tells the story of his adventures, and it, in turn, is told by an unnamed narrator, making it a second-degree account of the facts. We even meet, early on, a group of old women “knitting black wool” like a modern picture of the ancient Fates, dictating the destinies of humans and weaving the story in yet another way. At this point, while we are aware that the whole thing is a piece of fiction, the narrative’s multi-layered structure makes it all the more fantastical and unreal, and the reader is at risk of losing his footing, just like the hero of the story. So much so that, at some point towards the middle of the novel, putting his narrative in doubt, Marlow cries out:

Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream — making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream — sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams…

Heart of Darkness is a groundbreaking text that digs into the dark depths of the human psyche. And while it is written in sumptuous, almost marmoreal prose, it searches for sensations underneath language, nightmares underneath clear thought, the unutterable, silence, darkness. In short, only read Heart of Darkness with a double Polish vodka or a potent antidepressant close at hand!

Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe argued that there is more than a whiff of racism in Conrad’s novel — not just because of his use of the N-word (which was commonplace at the time), but because the natives in his fiction, with few exceptions, are little more than animalistic stick figures. In a sense, Conrad is still in the rut of traditional European prejudices, whereby darkness, notably dark skin, is a symbol of ugliness, moral brutality, viciousness, even cannibalism (see Shakespeare’s “Moors”, for instance, Aaron in Titus Andronicus or Othello).

However, at the same time — and this shows how ambiguous and murky this short novel gets — Heart of Darkness can also be construed as a criticism of Western colonialism and a denunciation of White, Western ferocity — in this sense, there is a kinship between Heart of Darkness and Moby-Dick. From the start, Marlow reflects: “when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago — the other day... darkness was here”. Now flowing through one of the most civilised cities on earth, the River Thames was, not long ago, curving and coiling over a primitive wilderness. Besides, as the story later shows, it only takes a few weeks, on the shores of the Congo River, for a “cultured” European to revert into a stinking crook, eaten away by greed, and turn eventually into a beast or a demon or a grotesque deity. “All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz.”

And so, Marlow’s journey through the jungle is also a trip into a primaeval past, before civilisation. But, further still: it doesn’t take the overheated wilderness of a remote, lonely and prehistoric tropical rainforest for the metamorphosis of the European culture into a slaughterhouse to happen. Kurtz, the man who sank into insanity and monstrosity, is described chiefly as “a voice! a voice!” Where that voice comes from is not entirely clear either. Is that just Kurtz’s voice? Is that Marlow’s voice telling his story? Conrad’s voice writing his novel? Or some other deeper voice that surfaces from a hollow, dark, ominous silence?

Heavens! how that man could talk. He electrified large meetings. He had faith — don’t you see? — he had the faith. He could get himself to believe anything — anything. He would have been a splendid leader of an extreme party.’ ‘What party?’ I asked. ‘Any party,’ answered the other. ‘He was an — an — extremist.’

Indeed, the last words of Kurtz’s imperialistic manifesto are, as an afterthought, “Exterminate all the brutes!” Conrad was writing in the very last years of the 19th century. But it is impossible, in retrospect, not to think that the “voice” he writes about wasn’t already born in the very heart of Europe; that Heart of Darkness wasn’t a foreshadowing vision of the horror and destruction that would, only a few decades later, cover the European continent.

Heart of Darkness has been an immensely influential novella. Céline possibly drew inspiration from it to write the African episode of Voyage au bout de la nuit. There are also many similarities between the atmosphere of this novel and the sense of cosmic terror that H.P. Lovecraft developed in his novellas. J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World displays some similitude to Conrad’s story as well.

Heart of Darkness has also obviously influenced the cinema, starting with Orson Welles, who unsuccessfully attempted to adapt it. Likewise with Werner Herzog’s cult film, Aguirre, the Wrath of God — an epic movie on insanity set in the Amazon jungle. Finally, Francis Ford Coppola famously turned Conrad’s novel into a staggering, baroque, disturbing masterpiece about the Vietnam War: Apocalypse Now!

Nowadays, the upper Congo is no longer the heart of a ruthless ivory trade. But the region holds vast quantities of minerals that are critical for Western/Asian computing and renewable energy industries. As a result, under the convergence of this new mineral rush, significant financial interests, military conflicts and political instability, this part of the world is once more the scene of human greediness, atrocities, murder, slavery and rape. In a weird way, Kurtz’s whispered cry still resonates with us, “The horror! The horror!”

n  The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there.n

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is one of those books that everyone has been told to read. Whether by a teacher, a relative or even a friend, chances are you’ve had this book shoved down your throat in one way or another.

I started reading it expecting a classic that would land somewhere in the range between tediously boring and somewhat enjoyable. I ended up with the discovery of a gorgeous masterpiece and one of the best books I've read in a long, long time.

Conrad’s methods of storytelling are rather unique in many ways. This is hardly the most suspenseful nor the most complex book out there. It is merely a monologue by the protagonist Marlow where he describes the events of his journeys up the streams of the Congo to find the mysterious Mr. Kurtz, a man whose shadow is steeped in legend, but who leaves innumerable horrors in his wake.

What is by far the most enjoyable aspect of Heart of Darkness is the writing. Judging from the example of this one book, I would have no hesitation in considering Joseph Conrad one of the most talented writers of all time. In fact, the stunning eloquence filling the pages quite possibly made this classic the most beautifully written book I have read in my life.

Take as an example this description of the Thames from the very beginning of the book:

The old river in its broad reach rested unruffled at the decline of day, after ages of good service done to the race that peopled its banks, spread out in the tranquil dignity of a waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth. We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories.

This is one of those classics that I can very happily confirm holds that title for a reason. The combination of the beautiful and the horrible makes Heart of Darkness a true masterpiece of literature.

I’ve never read it before and thought it was time. I found the first part of the three the most satisfying. However, Marlow and/or Conrad has not fully convinced me what was so special or enigmatic about Kurtz, especially from the perspective of the former. Maybe it was a rhetorical gift?:

Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together? That was not the point. The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out preeminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.

But the language and the character of Marlow is both impressive and memorable:

This simply because I had a notion it somehow would be of help to that Kurtz whom at the time I did not see—you understand. He was just a word for me. I did not see the man in the name any more than you do. Do you see him? Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you ya dream—making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams . . .”

The themes and the context when and how this novella has been written are very important of course. But they’ve been discussed for 100 years. So for me again the way of narrating stood out, his desire to express with the words something almost inexpresable in human condition and his acknowledgment of the partial failure to do so.

Κάπου είκοσι πέντε χρόνια μετά την (μυσταγωγική) πρώτη ανάγνωση του ποιήματος "Οι Κούφιοι Άνθρωποι" του Τ.Σ. Έλιοτ, στο επίγραμμα του οποίου ο ποιητής μνημονεύει μια φράση από την Καρδιά του Σκότους ("Mistah Kurtz - he dead)", κι άλλα τόσα από την (εξίσου μυσταγωγική) πρώτη θέαση της "Αποκάλυψης Τώρα", ταινίας που, ως γνωστόν, βασίστηκε στο συγκεκριμένο βιβλίο του Τζ. Κόνραντ, φαίνεται πως ήρθε η ώρα του ίδιου του βιβλίου να αφηγηθεί το ταξίδι του Τσάρλι Μάρλοου μέσα από τον ποταμό Κονγκό προς την ενδοχώρα και τον αποσυνάγωγο και ιδιοφυή Κουρτς.

Σπουδαίο βιβλίο, "σαν ταξίδι μέσα στον χρόνο, προς τα πίσω, προς την αρχέγονη πραγματικότητα του κόσμου" και σαν ελευθερη κατάδυση στα απροσμέτρητα (σκοτεινά) βάθη της ανθρώπινης ψυχής.

Confusing as hell. Just rent Apocalypse Now and pretend you read the book. Just remember to change a few details: 1) the setting is Africa, not Vietnam. 2) Kurtz is an ivory trader. He is not in the army. 3) Kurtz does not get killed; he gets sick and dies. 4) There are no puppies.
That's pretty much it.

Read for: 12th grade AP English

حلقة عن الرواية في دودة كتب

https://youtu.be/Wx-YQSNA1mY

رواية فذة، عميقة عمق قاتل، كل مرة قرأتها قبل مانام حلمت بيها، وكل جلسات القراءة الكثيرة، والقصيرة اللي قرأتها خلالها، كانت محاولات لتخفيف حدة أثرها.
شكرًا للكرمة على الترجمة وعلى اتاحتها على كيندل.

I re-read this for the first time since high school in preparation for teaching it to my own class of high schoolers for the first time. All I had taken with me from my first read was a general impression of "the horror, the horror!" that I think everyone leaves with- that sense, that feeling that pulls you back in just thinking about the book. I felt it again while reading the second time, too. This book is truly a black hole with a powerful gravity well that can suck you right in and pull you along with its tide in one gulp if you let it.

But this time I will also take more away from it than that. It's also a fantastic feat of writing craft that I couldn't really get the perspective to appreciate the first time around* (his ability to induce that terror was so effective), it's got a sense of horribly dark gallows humor at times, there's hints of the type of existentialism and fatalism seen in the reaction to modernization/industrialization all over literature, the sort of thing that lead to the cheering crowds, the eager volunteers that greeted the declarations of the start of WWI (a reminder to never, ever, take a classic out of the context of its time, however much it might transcend it).

In the end, this thing is a ghost story. I never realized it before- but that's exactly what it is. Its basic form and structure, it's manner of telling, the descriptions- it's Turn of the Screw, but Dickensian in its sense of *what* terrifying is, the substance of it. The beast stares also into you, personified.

*It makes total sense to me that Virginia Woolf was an admirer of his, which I just found out she was. I suppose that doesn't make sense on first glance, but sit with it for a minute, and it makes all the sense in the world. I must find her essay on him.**
**Although its possible he wouldn't have been of hers. I gotta say, the continuous misogyny/idealization of "pure" women was just a stunning lapse throughout the book that is perhaps even more illustrative of what goes on here than anything.

Soul! If anybody ever struggled with a soul, I am the man. And I wasn’t arguing with a lunatic either. Believe me or not, his intelligence was perfectly clear- concentrated, it is true, upon himself with horrible intensity, yet clear; and therein was my only chance- barring, of course, the killing him there and then, which wasn’t so good, on account of unavoidable noise



Human heart of full of darkness, but is humanity capable of expressing it fully? Can the wilderness of humanity be disseminated through its existence? Are ‘civilized’ people any different from those who are labeled as ‘savages? Does civilization take humanity away from the path of evolution whose milestones are empathy and compassion? Does the path of human evolution necessarily pass through river of power, imperialism which is built upon under-currents of darkness, racism, butchery and savagery? Does the gene responsible for human coloration also underline the superiority of human beings? The sombre snake of darkness, whose head is a sea of human wilderness, whose body runs through various expressions of human wilderness, if uncoiled it will spit out the abashed, ferocious, dingy poisons of humanity, which may send a feeling of harrowing terror if it comes face-to-face with humanity. Is mother Nature capable of enduring the possessions which humanity asserted through its evolution. Could humanity withstand itself on the first hand? Is humanity storing enough to deny to fall into trap of its own avarices and gluttony- the darkness it contains in itself? Do we fall into the void—do we drown or come out with a stronger sense of self?” These are the questions raised by Joseph Conrad through this novella which portrays the darkest history of human existence.

Though the novella maybe not from the contemporary world but it remains as relevant today as it was then, which could be said a timeless harrowing beauty. The book has dense imagery and emotions which has the ability to surprise and shock the reader simultaneously. It is said to be an essential starting point of modernism in English literature as Conrad as its literary experiments, themes could be interpreted in different ways, Conrad is said to bring his non-English sensibilities to English literature. The novella centers on the efforts of Marlow, Conrad's alter ego, to travel up an unnamed African river on behalf of his employer in order to bring back a rogue ivory trader, Mr Kurtz. Kurtz's reputation precedes him: "He is a prodigy… an emissary of pity and science and progress." Yet as Marlow gets closer to Kurtz, there is the growing suggestion that he has in some way become corrupted and descended into savagery.



His was an impenetrable darkness. I looked at him as you peer down at a man who is lying at the bottom of a precipice where the sun never shines.

Mr. Kurtz is depicted as a puzzle, a 'widespread virtuoso', who had been sending enormous measure of ivory from the hearts of this territory to the base station while other station aces were wallowing, when they were not passing on, or diverting feeble from the unfriendly condition. The whole campaign is much for one reason, that is of discovering Mr. Kurtz; while for Marlow - to converse with this riddle is the motivation behind this trial. Marlow becomes loyal to Kurtz, even to the dead Kurtz, and there seems to be little reason in it other than that he sympathized with Kurtz and at the same time loathed the general white lot present with him, whom he refers to as the ‘pilgrims’, seekers of ivory.

The shad of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysterious it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of the success and power.


The book seems to suggest that we are not able to understand the darkness that has affected Kurtz's soul—certainly not without understanding what he has been through in the jungle. Taking Marlow's point of view, we glimpse from the outside what has changed Kurtz so irrevocably from the European man of sophistication to something far more frightening. As if to demonstrate this, Conrad lets us view Kurtz on his deathbed. In the final moments of his life, Kurtz is in a fever. Even so, he seems to see something that we cannot. Staring at himself he can only mutter, "The horror! The horror!"

The darkness of the civilized humanity wherein a supposedly noble white man, who entered the jungles of Africa as a missionary of science, advancement and progress, however, during the course of his stay there, his inner self got better of him and he turned into a white tyrant, the tyranny of him is vicious and catastrophic, in whose comparison the barbarism of natives is nothing. In Kurtz, the alleged benevolence of colonialism has flowered into criminality. Marlow’s voyage from Europe to Africa and then upriver to Kurtz’s Inner Station is a revelation of the squalors and disasters of the colonial “mission”, staring at his own self, abashed and ashamed, Kurtz could only say- “The horror! The horror!; as if it’s the horror to eventually succumb to his real and vile self, the horror to realize that ideals of man could not sustain the vagaries of avarices of humanity and humanity finds itself eventually stained with its own murder. In Marlow’s mind, a journey back to the beginning of creation, when nature reigned exuberant and unrestrained, and a trip figuratively down as well, through the levels of the self to repressed and unlawful desires.

Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision- he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath:
“The horror! The horror!”


The prose of the novella is like a fresh wave as it contains some of the most fantastic use of language in English literature. The roots of Poland, the journey through France and South America as a seaman had influenced his style to have a wonderfully authentic colloquialism. We also see a style that is remarkably poetic for a prose work. More than a novel, the work is like an extended symbolic poem, affecting the reader with the breadths of its ideas as well as the beauty of its words. One may initially feel uncomfortable at the prose of Conrad but after braving through a few pages, the reader would certainly fell under Conrad’s spell.

Perhaps it was an impulse of unconscious loyalty, or the fulfilment of one of those ironic necessities that lurk in the facts of human existence. I don’t know. I can’t tell. But I went.



It may be said with authority that Heart of Darkness is a masterfully constructed parable on human nature, how does humanity in general behaves when tested under arduous circumstances. Despite his protestations, this is undeniably an invaluable historical document offering a glimpse into the horrific human consequences of the imperial powers' scramble for Africa as much as it is a compelling tale. As put up by Conrad himself that savagery is inherent in all of us, however civilized we may become, it is a brief interlude between innumerable centuries of darkness and the darkness yet to come.

Perhaps! I like to think my summing up would not have been a word of careless contempt. Better his cry- much better. It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory! That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond, when a long time after I heard once more, not his own voice, but the echo of his magnificent eloquence thrown to me from a soul as translucently pure as a cliff of crystal.