Overall, a wonderful collection of three short stories with my two favourite being Youth and of course the classic, The heart of darkness.
The journey of a patched up boat on its way to deliver coal in South East Asia was a captivating read particularly when seen through the eyes of a young sailor on his first voyage across the globe. The short story covers the many tiresome troubles encountered by seamen of that era and it left me wondering how they managed to transport anything at all given the rough seas and other onboard issues they faced.
But the classic, the heart of darkness and the journey to find the mysterious figure of Captain Kurtz in the heart of the Congo was indeed all the hype that its lived up to be. The mystery of the Congo and what lay hundreds of kilometers up the river was captivating especially with the vivid descriptions of the intertwining forest and large mountain ranges giving you that sense of the prehistoric and primordial.
The encounters finally of the native cultures they encountered and the descriptions of the cry they let out upon spotting the steam boat was indeed chilling leaving you feeling nervous of what lay for ahead for the men in the steamboat in the fog of the Congo river.
A classic that should be on anyones list

"'Kill! kill! kill!'... Have I not killed enough? ..." Conrad writes death very well. There are a number of murders and suicides in these four stories, ranging from the blatantly horrific to the unsettlingly serene. Kurtz's last words "The horror! The horror!" are still ringing in my ears, and I still feel unnerved by the bizarrely peaceful description of decapitated heads on sticks "smiling continuously at some endless and jocose dream of that eternal slumber."

This book contains four stories (An Outpost of Progress, Karain: A Memory, Youth: A Narrative, and Heart of Darkness), all written in the late 1890s when Conrad was in his early forties. They criticise European colonialism and the arbitrary distinction between savagery and civilisation.

Some pearls of wisdom for those interested:

"Few men realise that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd: to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and of its morals, in the power of its police and its opinion."

"We talk with indignation or enthusiasm; we talk about oppression, cruelty, crime, devotion, self-sacrifice, virtue, and we know nothing real beyond the words."

"The mind of man is capable of anything - because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future."

N.B. Conrad wrote in 1917 that Heart of Darkness "had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck". I can certainly attest to experiencing this after finishing Heart of Darkness

Esta edición en particular contiene dos relatos adicionales a El corazón de las tinieblas. El primero "Juventud", tiene como protagonista a Christopher Marlowe, el mismo de la novela que da título al libro. El tercero titulado en la presente edición como: "En las últimas", aunque su título también ha sido traducido como "La soga al cuello" o "Cabo de cuerda".
En el prólogo se aclara que se tomó la decisión editorial de publicarlos juntos, pues originalmente así fueron publicados por Conrad. Desde su publicación, varios lectores y críticos literarios se han empeñado en ver estos relatos como una representación de tres de las etapas en la vida de un hombre: juventud, madurez y vejez. Aunque Conrad negaba que compartieran algo más que el haber sido escritos en la misma etapa de su vida.
Los relatos están bien escritos y son interesantes. Aunque quizá sea el estilo del autor de escribir párrafos muy largos, que se me complicó bastante, tanto que por momentos sentía que no lo terminaba. Pero esa no era una opción para mí.
Pues hace un año lo propusieron en un Club de lectura y por estar tomando mi seminario de titulación, tuve que dejarlo inconcluso, pues solo leí "Juventud" y la novela que da título al libro.
Desde entonces ese "pendiente por retomar y concluir" me estuvo "haciendo ruido" y ahora aprovechando el encierro decidí concluirlo, aunque fue...

I only read Heart of Darkness...

I can't say I was exactly enthralled. Perhaps I was inexactly enthralled. This is one of those slippery narratives full of rich description that sort of falls through your fingers. Lots of introspection, assumption, vagueness, and ambiguity. I tend to love these kinds of stories (LESS THAN ZERO pops to mind), as they engage the reader on a completely different level than ones that spell everything out and lead the reader by the hand. This one, however, had a murkiness that just didn't always work for me. I drifted in and out. Knowing this book is on most TOP 100 BOOKS IN ENGLISH lists of course fucks with expectations, and knowing, too, how this story was supposed to be a kind of allegory for the dark nature of colonialism and an example of the ways in which the "civilized" and the "savages" are really one in the same--knowing these things doesn't always help. For one, I didn't entirely see where the evidence to support that particular allegory came from, though I can kind of see where it came from. Maybe. I'm not sure. I know the narrator's insistence on the overbearing and growing darkness was equal to all parts, not just one continent or the other. Perhaps that's it. I'm not sure. I may read this one again at a later date, as I do think it might stick with me in that way that I'll want to see what's really there. Only problem is that the narrative, while rich and elaborate at times, at many other times lacks intensity. Hard to describe what's missing. To say I got bored for long stretches seems too easy, but that's definitely part of it.

Oh well. I just read one of the top 100 books in English, I guess. Yea for me.

Review, (18/02/2009).

Perhaps it's my lack of knowledge as concerns this part of history? Or worse, perhaps there are fictions that I'm not yet open too? But this book, while having a wilderness about its prose, lacked much coherency as far as narrative. It flew over me a little, I suspect. I may read it again someday in future.

Review, (27/06/2017).

So, I come back to this something like a decade later, and spurred to it by a paragraph from Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt is speaking in the context of modern totalitarianism and its histories, and Conrad's story takes place in the Congo; but, if memory recalls, Arendt bridges from one to the other, seeing in the imperialist crimes of the Congo a kind of testing ground for the totalitarian political systems of the 20th century. Here she's concerned with a certain kind of character, and it's interesting at least that I was put onto this paragraph in the context of discussion of fascist segments of the contemporary American right.

'Like Mr. Kurtz in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,’ they were “hollow to the core,” “reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity and cruel without courage.” They believed in nothing and “could get (themselves) to believe anything-anything.” Expelled from a world with accepted social values, they had been thrown back upon themselves and still had nothing to fall back upon except, here and there, a streak of talent which made them as dangerous as Kurtz if they were ever allowed to return to their homelands. For the only talent that could possibly burgeon in their hollow souls was the gift of fascination which makes a “splendid leader of an extreme party.” The more gifted were walking incarnations of resentment like the German Carl Peters (possibly the model for Kurtz), who openly admitted that he “was fed up with being counted among the pariahs and wanted to belong to a master race.” But gifted or not, they were all game for anything from pitch and toss to wilful murder” and to them their fellow-men were “no more one way or another than that fly there.” Thus they brought with them, or they learned quickly, the code of manners which befitted the coming type of murderer to whom the only unforgivable sin is to lose his temper.'

I guess I can see further into Conrad's story nowadays without so much a cloudy lens. The heavy repetition and insistence of abyssal themes and devices, described elsewhere as "adjectival", work more to deliberately obscure than to represent. The catastrophic events of the story take place against a backdrop of colonialism, but their stage is the interior of the white individuals and the narrator. There's also a thick texture of racism in the text itself that's stifling: the Indigenous people are sometimes animal-like, sometimes horrific shrieking mobs, but mostly just lack any interiority even when they reach out to the narrator (Marlow). In one scene, when he finds himself by a series of missteps in what he describes as "the gloomy circle of some Inferno", these dying people lose all their human shape in the text and become masses growing out of the trees and the earth.

Whether any of this is Conrad's, we can doubt. There's wisdom in this story and what it portends. And it is a horror story, foremost and powerfully. But when the abyssal and the imperialistic sit side-by-side, I guess I expect each to bleed into the other. And when it all dries, the residue will still be thick.

Fever dream...

One night a group of friends are aboard a boat on the Thames waiting for the tide before they can set sail. As darkness grows around them, one of the men, Marlow, tells the story of the time he worked as a pilot on a steamboat on the Congo and of the rogue ivory trader, Kurtz, whom he met there.

I realise I’m white and descended from colonialist stock, so I recognise that my judgement may not be as objective as I would like, but it astonishes me that Conrad has, among some critics, a reputation as a racist. This book is an excoriating study of the horrors of colonialism in Africa – horrors perpetrated in this case by Belgium, but Conrad leaves that deliberately vague so I think we can assume he is speaking generally as well as specifically. Conrad shows the devastating impact the white man had on both the society and the land of Africa, but he also shows that this devastation turns back on the coloniser, corrupting him physically and psychologically, and by extension, corrupting the societies from which he comes.

Millions of words have been written in analysis of the text by people considerably more qualified (and even more opinionated) than I, so rather than try to argue the case for or against the book on a moral level, I’ll stick to how I feel it works as a novella. And on that score, my feelings are somewhat mixed.

Having now read it twice, I have to say I find it quite hard to read, not because of the horrors but because the writing, although superbly descriptive, often darkly lyrical and with some wonderfully disturbing imagery, is sometimes convoluted and rather unclear. The introduction and excellent notes in my Oxford World’s Classics edition suggest that often Conrad was being deliberately vague – as I mentioned earlier about Belgium, for instance – and I’m sure people at the time would have known enough about their world to be able to fill in the blanks. But frankly, I think I’d have struggled without the notes. Marlow also jumps forward from time to time, leaving linking bits of the story unsaid, perhaps realistically in terms of how we think and relate stories verbally, but I found it rather jarring in written form. As a lazy reader, I was irritated that several times I felt I had to go back and read a section again to fully catch the meaning and how we’d got from there to here, so to speak.

However, the book’s strengths far outweigh its weaknesses. The overall effect is of a hallucination or a nightmare, full of imagery about darkness. Marlow tells us that he is feverish for at least part of the journey and on his return to civilisation, and there is a sense of it all being a fever dream. Everything feels exaggerated, from the descriptions of the impenetrable jungle, to the Africans’ worship of Kurtz as a kind of god, to the attitudes of the white men to Kurtz’ apparent power over them. We are told repeatedly of Kurtz’ eloquence, but are never permitted to hear his views in his own voice. On the very rare occasions that he speaks on the page, his words are unexceptional (apart from on one occasion which I won’t go into because it’s a major spoiler, and becomes the climactic point of the book). Did Conrad choose to do that because he felt perhaps that he couldn’t make him eloquent enough to live up to his reputation? I doubt it, since Conrad can write supremely eloquently. So was it perhaps to leave the reader in doubt as to whether Kurtz was truly eloquent, or whether his listeners exaggerated his eloquence to justify their cult-like admiration for him? I don’t know, but I found it intriguing to consider. (We undoubtedly have leaders today that no-one could seriously describe as eloquent, but who inspire crazed uncritical devotion in their followers.)

The one thing that doesn’t have a feeling of unreality is the physical cruelty of the white men’s treatment of the African workers in the stations along the river, and interestingly these are the sections that Conrad writes in the most straightforward manner. The cruelty didn’t surprise me too much (though it horrified me), but what I did find odd was the feeling of almost total incompetence and futility of the white man’s ventures. I don’t know enough about the Belgian attitude to their colonies, but again the introduction tells me that they had a particularly bad reputation at that time even among fellow colonial powers. Unlike in colonial literature by and about the Brits in Africa (and even in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart), there is no suggestion of the white man attempting to bring “civilisation” to the “savages”, or religion. I suspect this is deliberate, since Conrad seems to be comparing the two cultures and suggesting that, while they are different, one is not intrinsically superior to the other – they are simply at different stages of development. One of the most intriguing things he does is frequently to compare the white man in Africa to what it must have been like for a “civilised” Roman sent to pacify and exploit savage Britons back in the days of their Empire. Unspoken, this reminds the reader that all empires fall in time, but also that all empires leave a legacy on those they colonised, for good or ill, or both.

I’m glad to have read it, especially for the wonderful descriptive prose and the feverish imagery, and it certainly deserves its status as a major classic of colonial literature – hence the 5-star rating. However, though still a newcomer to Conrad’s work, I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as some of his other stories – Karain, for example, or Lord Jim, probably because I found them easier to read. I wondered why it’s the one that seems always to be connected to his name, and I can only conclude that it’s the vagueness itself, which allows critics and academics to argue endlessly over meanings and moral values, and leaves space for later writers and film-makers to reinterpret it as they choose. This reader, however, would have preferred just a little more plain speaking and a little less need to rely on the notes...

* * * * *

I thoroughly enjoyed the other three stories in the volume too:

n  An Outpost of Progressn – Two men, Kayerts and Carlier, are dropped off to run a Company trading post in the Belgian Congo. They are basically incompetent, relying on their black agent and workers to do the work of trading for the precious ivory for which they are there. However, events spiral out of their control and they are left running low on resources and increasingly scared of the, to them, incomprehensible and savage people in this wild land. And then the boat that was due to relieve them is delayed…

This starts off with a good deal of humour, full of irony and sarcasm as Conrad turns the prevailing ideas about the superiority of the white man on their head. We see how quickly the veneer of “civilisation” falls away when men are isolated in a vastly different culture they don’t understand. Gradually the story darkens, until it reaches a powerfully dark and dramatic ending of true horror. The writing is wonderful, full of lush descriptions that create an ominously threatening environment, with enough vagueness so that we, like the characters, fear what may be lurking just outside. And his depiction of the downward spiral of his characters into moral weakness and eventual terror is done brilliantly. A great story.

n  Youth: A Narrativen – This tells of Marlow, who will appear again in Heart of Darkness, as a twenty-year-old in his first voyage as second mate on an ill-fated sea trip in the rickety old ship Judea. A series of disasters leads to the ship constantly having to return to port for repairs, and things don’t improve once they finally get off on their journey. It’s quite funny and is apparently a fairly accurate record of Conrad’s own voyage as a young man aboard the equally doomed Palestine. It’s about the vigour and optimism of youth – how even disasters can seem like exciting adventures before age and experience make us jaded and fearful. It’s enjoyable, but a little too long for its content, and with nothing like the depth of the other stories in the collection.

n  Karain: A Memoryn – The narrator is one of three adventurers, smuggling arms into the Malay Archipelago. They come to know Karain, the headman of a small land which he and his followers have invaded and occupied. Karain is a haunted man, perhaps literally, perhaps superstitiously. He turns to his white friends for protection…

The story in this one, although good, is somewhat secondary to the wonderfully descriptive and insightful writing. The prose in the first two or three pages is sublime, as Conrad swiftly creates a place, a country, a man and a people, all with a level of lyricism and mysticism that places the reader there, already unsettled before the tale begins. Conrad shows how colonialism disrupts and corrupts long-held traditions and ways of life, but how old beliefs nonetheless endure. And lest the reader should wish to mock the superstitions of the natives, Conrad forestalls this by reminding us with brutal irony that many of our own cherished traditions and beliefs arise out of superstition too. He also shows that, when white and black meet not as master and slave but in a kind of equality, the possibility for friendship exists, even when their cultures are so different. I loved this story.


NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Oxford World’s Classics.

www.fictionfanblog.wordpress.com

4/10

I honestly was not a big fan. What I thought would be a gripping little adventure turned out to be more of a nihilistic musing. Parts of the story are interesting, and it does raise some very interesting questions about mankind’s role in the order of nature. I just couldn’t really get into it, even if it is only 100 pages.

I'm surprised that this amazing story only has three stars and as I read reviews I realised the problem. Everyone, please note Apocalypse Now is completely different from Heart of Darkness. It is very loosely based on the story, but it Apocalypse Now is your only sole reason for wanting to read this novella then you will be sorely disappointed.

There are more than one thing at work in Heart of Darkness. Yes, there is obviously the numerous postcolonial readings, but I feel there is also this idea of surroundings affecting our behaviour. Marlow always describes the jungle as having a dark force in it, I.e. the jungle being the 'heart of darkness' which essentially captures Kurtz's soul and turns it into something evil. This is possibly the 'horror' Kurtz sees in his dying moments.

This image of Africa being a darkness does have racist connotations as the Africans are always described as savages, implying it is they who makes this jungle dark. I recommend reading Chinua Achebe's 'An Image of Africa:Racisin in Heart of Darkness' for more on the subject.

Estos tres relatos marineros no tienen, en sí, un gran interés narrativo, quiero decir que salvo el primero, Juventud, cuya historia resulta emocionante, no nos cuentan historias que cautiven en sí mismas. Además el estilo es perezosamente descriptivo, se regodea de forma poética en escenarios y situaciones, lo que con una lectura pausada y relajada constituye una virtud. Pero es que en realidad es la simbología de la vida humana que subyace lo que la hace magistral. El prólogo de su traductor me parece maravilloso y necesario, para apreciar lo que en realidad pretende explicarnos el autor. La juventud, la edad de los impulsos, de la intuición, de actuar creyendo que se puede con todo, de ir a por tus sueños; la madurez, en la que entra en juego la racionalización, la mesura, el buscar justificación a aquellos impulsos anteriores, a darles un sentido que no nos haga hundirnos, la reflexión, la compresión, el corazón; y la vejez, como la edad de la enajenación, de la negación, del repudio. Los relatos son fieles exponentes de estas características, e invitan a reflexionar sobre la necesidad de intentar mantenerse en el corazón de las tinieblas el mayor tiempo posible, y no dejarse arrastrar por la demencia de la vejez, porque la juventud dura un suspiro.

(More like a 2.5)

Admittedly, I am feeling quite lazy so this review will be lackluster.

Generally, Conrad's writing is sensational and captivating. The way he writes lends itself to waxing philosophical and he has a lot of interesting judgments on humanity and colonialism specifically that come through very eloquently. However, one thing that really got me stuck was how often he uses esoteric sea vocabulary. It made me think of the joke about Moby Dick and how Melville includes near-entire chapters about whaling. Or how Hugo in Les Mis uses pages and pages to describe a single landscape. Of course, this collection is only 200-some pages so it clearly wasn't that terrible but the fact that there is a glossary of seafaring terms in the back should tell you something.

What's interesting to me is how much scorn this story (and Conrad in general) seems to have drawn. In a way it's good, because Chinua Achebe's dislike of Conrad likely contributed to his work Things Fall Apart which provides a really important perspective on colonialism from the colonized people. But at all points it seemed like Conrad was markedly anti-colonial, not pro in the slightest. An Outpost of Progress paints the white colonizers as incompetent with one of them pulling a Dick Cheney and shooting the other one by accident. They are incredibly dependent on the native Africans who understand the motives and drives of "the Company" (the colonizing entity) much better than the whites. It's like a Marx Brothers depiction of African colonialism where the colonists are the chumps.

Karain: A Memory, does admittedly infantilize the Malaysian prince, but this is from the perspective of the colonists, not Conrad himself. In fact, it's clear that the point of the story is to show that in spite of the colonists' concept of racial difference/inferiority, the Prince presents them with a uniquely human problem that cannot be solved with their 'white superiority'. Karain is a stand in for human nature and while the colonists begin by seeing him as inferior, they certainly don't end that way.

Youth: A Narrative was not my favorite. It's essentially a story about a boat that tries really hard to get to Bangkok and fails numerous times. There's something in there about the spirit of adventure and maybe how insidiously dull it is, but I lost it under all the boring seafaring nonsense.

Heart of Darkness was honestly also a bit boring and I wish there would have been more focus on Kurtz and how he descended into madness and whether or not he really descended at all. Kurtz is clearly a representative for Colonialism writ large ("All of Europe made Kurtz") and in his final moments, Kurtz is made (by Conrad) to condemn both himself and "all the hearts that beat in the darkness". There was some interesting stuff here with the 'genius as madman' trope and a bit more like Karain with the 'white-colonist-comes-to-see-Blacks-as-not-inferior' trope but overall it was a 'meh' for me.

Notably, I can see how this last trope I mentioned causes a lot of issues. It seems like a pitifully low bar to endorse. And today, I would agree. But in 1899, I'd argue that Conrad was on the forefront of anti-colonial sentiment among white Europeans. Is it sad? Yes. But I still think it's noteworthy.

"One heart speaks - another listens; and the earth, the sea, the sly, the passing wind and the stirring leaf, hear also the futile tale of the burden of life." 46

WHAT A BEAUTIFUL SENTENCE OMG
I could annotate Karain for hours i'm in love

It took me a while but finally read Heart of Darkness. I loved the beautiful, horrible description Conrad writes of the closeness of the jungle. Almost claustrophobic. But this book had two other stories. The first was Youth, about an early shipping expedition Marlowe( also the central character of HOD). It is a lighter story of the many mishaps his ship endured.
The third story, The End of the Tether, was actually my favourite. Follows an old sea captain who has fallen on hard times and is skippering an old steam ship on his last trip at sea. This novel hit me on a human level while HoD was impactful on a universal, environmental and human decency level.
Glad I read them finally.