Conrad is an excellent stylist, especially for someone who didn't speak English fluently until his twenties. A single instance in his story can evolve into pages worth of metaphoric description, providing incredibly vivid and thought-provoking imagery. I was ecstatic to learn one of my favorite anti-war films, "Apocalypse Now", was actually based on this story. The story without its metaphors and intense themes can be a little simple and slow at times but this is certainly a classic text that all readers should enjoy at least once.
Heart of Darkness: 3.5/5
The Secret Sharer: 2.5/5

I picked up this book with trepidation as I will now openly admit--yes, openly admit--I "fake read" this book in high school (please don't tell Mr. Autry!). For the record, it was the only book I fake read, but I remember being so bored by haughty tone and old-fashioned language that I just couldn't stay awake, page after page!

To complete my own honest cannon of literature, I felt that I MUST do a complete, true read of this book. After all, it is in list after list of best books...and Conrad is constantly lauded as a ground-breaking, best author.

Alas, even with the rosy glasses of age and wisdom perched on my nose, I could not enjoy this book. The dry language (while at times breathtaking: the African jungle! The steamy, ashy, rotting, scary adventure of an unknown land!) mostly put me to sleep the same as it did 20+ years ago in high school. The offensive language ("us Whites" and "those savages") while a part of the culture and language of the time, and possibly hinting toward the author's view of injustice, was difficult to read. Europeans did horrible things in Africa. It is important to know how colonialism ruined the people, the land, and the resources. But this novel at times seemed to gloat in the glory of European expansionism in a way that was hard to read.

That said, Conrad is Conrad and this first-person narrative, while fiction, is an important study in who we are, where we've been, and why the historical novels are important. It is necessary for us to study colonialism and commit ourselves to not creating these atrocities again. It is necessary for us to study this narrative and realize how these Europeans felt: morally and physically superior to anything "darker" than themselves (while they themselves had the darkest of souls).

Perhaps my favorite part of the book is the end where the narrator visits The Intended (nameless, I believe?) and cannot bring himself to tell her the truth about her fiancee. The start of his own moral quandary, perhaps? In any case, a first light into the darkness.

Very moving book about both the loving and dark nature of human beings; realistic lacking a fairy tail ending.

This was fine, I know it’s an iconic story and all but holy shit it was dry and really tough to read. Same goes for the Secret Sharer, it was super interesting but didn’t really go anywhere imo

Because my high school was phobic of non-American authors or history, I never read Heart of Darkness as a teenager. Although now, having thoroughly relished its pages, I'm glad I waited for a maturer age. Years after I first scanned Dante and gorged on Apocalypse Now, I see HOD is a very different work. It surprised me in countless ways, and I'm grateful to have explored its jungles when I did.

The narrator surprised me most of all, his anti-colonial grumbling, his masochistic drive, and his unsentimental disdain for everything that goes on. His search for Kurtz feels less like a mission than the preoccupation of an obsessive; Kurtz is his hobby, or even his sport, en lieu of anything better to do. I loved the tone of his writing, both eloquent and bitchy, as only a world-weathered Eastern European could write about the world's most godforsaken place.

The narrative is funnier than I expected, then in turns weirder, scarier, and more beautiful -- it's a masterpiece from the first description of the open sea to the narrator's final, desperate lie. Apocalypse Now is among my favorite films, but even Brando's rendition of "the horror" pales before Conrad's description of Kurtz's haunting utterance.

To then read on, past the jungle cult, and meet Kurtz's "intended," is among the queasiest scenes I've ever read, and I smiled wickedly at every sentence. The Dostoyevskyan web of formality and falsehood was almost too delicious, a whimpering finale to Victorian mores and misconceptions. Conrad's prose laughs louder at English romanticism than any satirist I've read. Even as Britain was finishing its imperial palace, Conrad was ripping up the floorboards. The horror, indeed.

(3.5)

One of these novellas, in my humble opinion, is perfectly serviceable; a good, solid tale that does what it comes to do and leaves some really great philosophical conversation in its wake without provoking any hairier conversation in the context of over a century's worth of hindsight.

The Secret Sharer is about a young sea captain who has been abruptly commissioned to command an unfamiliar ship on its return voyage from Thailand to England. He is an utter stranger to its crew, and too socially uncertain to change that fact anytime soon. Matters are only complicated when, alone on the deck one night, he discovers and rescues an exhausted swimmer from the bay who turns out to be a sailor from a nearby ship on the run for *accidentally* killing a shipmate during a fierce storm some time ago. The novella then revolves around the anxious efforts of the captain to keep his newfound friend hidden from the suspicions of not only his own crew but also the crew of the other ship that boards with questions, and it's some really good stuff. Conrad's old-traditional-sailor personality pokes through very sharply in the novella's ultimate moral message - but not in any way that disagreed with me. I enjoyed it thoroughly, and the writing is quite engaging.

The other novella, of course, is Heart of Darkness.

Where to begin.
When I read this for a high-school English class, I quite enjoyed it; I thought the creeping horror and philosophical dilemmas of Kurtz's descent into madness were very well-done, and I adored the writing style.
Reading it now with a more mature perspective, I am... unsure, to say the least.
Like the previous story, this novella follows a young seaman appointed to the head of an unfamiliar ship - except this time, the ship in question is a finnicky old steamboat headed up the length of a massive African river implied (but never explicitly stated) to be the Congo, at the height of Europe's depraved, atrocity-filled scramble for the abundant resources of the continent. He soon catches wind of a company agent named Kurtz, a man of seemingly dazzling charisma and talent of all kinds who has earned his employers untold riches in elephant tusks. The protagonist aspires to meet this Kurtz and really see for himself what all the hubbub is about--until the steamboat arrives at the ivory company's innermost trading post and discovers that Kurtz has become the ruthless and quasi-religious ruler of the nearby African tribes, compelling them to violent raids in his endless search for ivory.
I'm not going to elaborate further on the plot because, frankly, I'm very tired from thinking about this book so dang much.
The difficulty I face is that I've always interpreted the grander message of this piece as this:

European nations deride African civilization as a bunch of primitive savages for their different way of life, when, in reality, Europeans are just as easily swayed to a primitive and violent state.

This thesis in itself I find distasteful, as it implies that the condition of the various African civilizations that Europeans encountered then is a necessarily base and undesirable state of living.
This novella, unfortunately, leans further into this theory by describing its African characters, without exception, using adjectives like "savage," "wild," and "horrid." Native Africans are depicted through Marlow's eyes as sheepish, ape-like, and unknowable shadows; the only one that he seems to form any kind of bond with is the tribesman who he trains to tend the steamboat's boiler, and in that circumstance, he explicitly states liking that man just because of his acquired usefulness.

It's one of those qualities that one needs to take with a grain of salt; this novella was written over a century ago, and not necessarily meant to withstand a modern appraisal. It was intended as a fictionalized account of Conrad's own experiences as a steamboat captain on the Belgian Congo, and the insights into human nature that he encountered therein.

And there are spots of real power in this novella that hold up to this day.
Early in his journey into the African interior, Marlow encounters a work troop of company-controlled Africans that are blasting through a mountain with dynamite to make way for a railroad. Downhill from the work site, he finds a twilit grove where the twisted bodies of those workers too weak to work anymore lay in heaps, sick and dying. Later, he meets the European head of the operation, who sits at his desk content in his forms and spreadsheets, speaking of the whole business with nonchalant ease. In that moment, Marlow actively thinks back to the grove of the dying.
That contrast is a powerful and subtle condemnation of the imperialist capitalist structure of the European enterprise in Africa, one that remains very well-executed to this day and that I wish the novella was more about.

The writing remains stellar, if a little adjective-heavy in the visual-description parts, and the dialogue is really well done. This story is excellent from a construction standpoint.
I just feel it would hold up much better in my eyes if Conrad extended his sweeping umbrella-theory about the dark side of human nature more over the conquerors and less over the conquered.

Secret Sharer: 4 stars
Heart of Darkness: 3 stars

I give this novella collection 3.5 extremely expressive sailor mustaches out of 5 quirky Russian jester-groupies.

Reading this requires singular focus and perpetual concentration. Thus, comprehending a single sentence at times yields a notable feeling of fulfillment and satisfaction.

Following a strong compulsion, I picked this up after having finished The Poisonwood Bible, whose setting in Congo from the perspective of a missionary family in the early 1960s suggested to me it would be interesting to read of Marlow’s trip up the Congo River decades earlier.

I was not disappointed. Poisonwood emphasizes the inability of the colonizers (and visiting missionaries with their western cultural ideas and dogmatic religious positions) to understand the place they are at and whom they are among. But it also provides a glimpse into the culture and life of the Congolese. Heart of Darkness, on the other hand, offers the perspective of the colonizers, or, more accurately put, the attitudes which helped found colonization. In Conrad’s novel, we see, through the eyes of Marlow, that exploitation and profit pretty much become the sole reasons for a presence in Congo.

The introduction to the edition I read observes that there is some debate over whether Conrad was a “moral” writer, meaning, I suppose, one could argue either that Heart of Darkness is an indictment or that it is simply an observation. I may be projecting my own views onto the work, but I find it hard to read as anything other than an indictment, not only of colonization, exploitation, and greed, but of human behavior in general.

It’s tempting to label the novella’s style as impressionistic, but the density of its descriptions probably makes this an invalid judgment. Nonetheless, as a reader I feel left with mostly impressions; though the specific details themselves faded almost as soon as I turned the page or proceeded to the next paragraph, the impressions they left are going to stick, namely the extension of the jungle almost into one’s very body and the psychological claustrophobia that results.

This is an oft-alluded-to book, often simply by references to the character Kurtz, who essentially becomes consumed by the jungle, by delusions of grandeur, and by an obsession with amassing ivory. Here are some famous lines:

“Exterminate all the brutes!”

“The horror! The horror!” (Kurtz’s last words)

“Mistah Kurtz. He dead.”

The quotes I think I’d most like to remember, however, are these:

“It was as unreal as everything else--as the philanthropic pretense of the whole concern.”

“By heavens! there is something after all in the world allowing one man to steal a horse while another may not look at a halter.”

Rating: 2.5

I wanted to like this so badly, but for some reason it was torturous to read. I think it had to do with the length of the book. Even though it isn't that long, it took me ages to read. I don't think those extremely long paragraphs helped either. There truly is some interesting stuff in there and I wouldn't mind reading this again in an educational setting but for now my rating reflects my enjoyment while reading it.

I recently read the "Heart of Darkness" portion of the book for my High School AP English class. Overall, I would have to agree with the majority of other reviewers here in saying that this book WAS BORING! Unlike many of my peers, I DO read for pleasure and know a good book when I read one. I'm not lying when I say that I thought that the writing was actually very good. However, the overall storyline was mediocre at best. Yeah, sure, metaphors and a deeper meaning, and all that, blah blah blah boring. I don't much care for all that stuff. If it's not an interesting story I don't much see the point in taking the time to read it. I think Marlow can sum up the storyline of the book when he says "I went up that river to the place where I first met the poor chap" (p. 70) and I think Kurtz sums up how I felt about the book in general when he says "The horror! The horror!" (p.154). I really did not enjoy the book and it was an overall horrid waste of three and a half hours of my life. (Plus time to write a review on this site for my English class)

I love allegories, but Joseph Conrad is just so damn hard to get into.

Seriously, I just don't understand him. He's a MAJOR rambler and a big fan of referencing to that-one-character-who's-the-uncle-to-that-one-person-you-met-20-pages-ago-and-who-turns-out-to-be-a-major-part-of-the-plot. Which can get pretty annoying after a while. I mean, it was only about 150 pages; I shouldn't have spent nearly as much time on it as I really did.

But besides the horrendous and terribly dry writing, the story itself wasn't too bad. As I mentioned above, I love, love, LOVE allegories; there's something about finding a new connection that just makes me happy on the inside (is that too nerdy? I think it is). I really enjoyed the complexity of the natives and Marlow and even Kurtz, despite the fact that he was a total douchebag...and a little bit nuts.

The only thing I wished Conrad had expanded on were the characters on the boat at the beginning of the story; I mean, did they just leave? And the ending itself was a bit rushed. I had no sense of closure.

But maybe that was the point. To imply that the heart of darkness and the evil of humanity never ends and never will end. Or maybe I'm taking this allegory thing too far.

RTC.

When I entered the U. of Chicago, there were graffiti around campus: "'Mr. Kurtz, he dead!' Bird lives!" Now, how hip was that! So, when I found out that the first part of it was from Heart of Darkness, of course I had to read that. I admired Conrad for being a non-native speaker writing in English and I'm still a sucker for the Victorian gentleman thing. I know, totally sick for a Black man. So shoot me! . . . Did/do I see the white supremist viewpoint. Sure. That was out there. The book puts you inside the head of a character and into a time and place that allows you to understand the worldview, one that has thoroughly conditioned our history and still is around. Besides that, it's a great yarn.