As a kid I tried to read this book, as it was an influence on both Apocalypse Now--a movie I dug. I couldn't finish it, and chalked it up to not being smart enough to get it. I want to travel back in time and tell that young man that he was right. This is a horrible novel that insists on itself.

I'm going to avoid the politics as Chinua Achebe's criticism of the book nails it. The Africans aren't given a voice or a human image, the n-word is tossed around too much, and it's silly to talk about a frontier where people of color live normal lives as a horrendous hellscape for the white man.

Instead I want to focus on the artistry. I fell asleep reading it thrice. It's clunky. It features a third person omniscient narrator, but the bulk of the story is told from a lead who narrates to a room full of people who don't react. (It would've made more sense to have Marlowe tell the story as a journal--making him a dark mirror to Kurtz and his writings.) He hits you over the head with the theme way too much with the word "dark" appearing rougly every three pages. There is no intensity to the travel. And the only intriguing part--the eventual meeting between Marlowe and Kurtz--is too brief. Although it does provide one of the best dialogue exchanges, one that Coppolla stole for his film verbatim.

Avoid. By God, avoid this book. ( )

J’ai revu [Apocalypse Now] il y a une dizaine de jours, et je me suis dit que c’était le moment de me lancer dans une relecture de [Au Cœur des Ténèbres], que j’avais lu adolescente et dont je ne me souvenais que dans les grandes lignes. Bien sûr, cette relecture a donc été au moins en partie influencée par l’interprétation de Francis Ford Coppola, mais j’espère avoir réussi à m’en détacher aussi.
Je crois que ce court roman m’a paru aussi difficile à déchiffrer que lors de ma première lecture, même si j’ai peut-être cette fois été plus sensible à la métaphore du fleuve qui serait comme un cheminement vers la folie. Je ne suis pas sûre que je dirais folie d’ailleurs. Pour moi, ce fleuve est plutôt un chemin le long duquel on se dépouille de la culture et de la société. Arrivé en son bout, se trouve l’homme sans les garde-fous de la société ou les remparts de la moralité, l’homme « sauvage », l’homme « préhistorique », Conrad multiplie ainsi les épithètes, en définitive, « L’horreur ! L’horreur ! »
Les interprétations de ce roman ont été tellement nombreuses depuis sa publication il y a plus d’un siècle que je ne clorai pas le débat et que je ne pourrai donner que mon interprétation personnelle (et qui de plus pourrait bien varier la prochaine fois que je lis ce livre). Conrad semble convaincu de la mission civilisatrice des colons en Afrique, mais très critique quant à la façon dont ils mènent cette mission. L’Afrique est donc bien selon lui cette terre vierge où l’on n’est pas encore rentré dans l’histoire et demeure soumis à ses instincts naturels. L’homme civilisé qui s’y aventure, plutôt que d’amener la civilisation avec lui, se dépouille peu à peu de celle-ci pour renouer avec l’avidité, la cruauté, la gratuité de la violence, un état qui le rapproche peu à peu de la folie. Kurtz, cet homme qui avait de grandes idées généreuses au départ en est la personnification et, devant la vanité de ses grands desseins, ne peut que constater l’horreur apparaît quand les masques tombent.
C’est me semble-t-il une vision très noire de l’humanité et de la fragilité du vernis tenu qu’est la notion de civilisation et de morale qui sous-tend nos sociétés. Dans le style avec lourd qui caractérise Conrad mais aussi dans les images vivantes qu’il fait naître, il nous dit tout son pessimisme quant à ce que nous sommes en réalité, derrière cette belle façade de ce que nous croyons (ou voulons) être. Un livre qui se lit et se relit, lentement pour se laisser pénétrer de ses phrases et de ses non-dits, mais un livre qui ne redonne pas foi en l’humanité.

Si Marlow yung tropa sa inuman na imbis mag-ambag sa alak pulutan dinaan nalang sa kwento ( )

The book that inspired the film, 'Apocalypse Now'.

I read this book many, many years ago and i especially wanted to read it again before re-reading 'The Little Paris Bookshop'.   From my long ago memory of Heart of Darkness it struck me that there was something similar going on in the two books so i wanted to re-read both.   More on the similarities in the next review, for this review i'm just sticking with 'Heart of Darkness'.

So what did i think?   It has the usual politically incorrect Victorian wording and attitude to non-Europeans, which tends towards appalling, even more so than usual as this book is mostly telling a story of the Belgian Congo when the Belgians were exploiting it and its peoples.

There's a lot been said about this book, both good and bad, and you can read more on the wiki page if you want to know more.

For me, i'd like to see the glass half full with this one.   Yes i understand the other side of the debate, and i most certainly do not condone any colonialism, i absolutely condemn it all, but...

This book was written in the Victorian age and i do feel that if you are going to read Victorian literature then you have to lay aside your modern prejudices, morals, ethics, etc., and understand that the people writing it were victims and hostages of their own age as we are of ours.   It's not so much politically incorrect as it's far more politically ignorant.   And for me that is what a lot of this book is about: the political ignorance of the age.

Yes, Conrad uses words that are considered repugnant now, but they were not considered so when he wrote this.   And its the words, i feel, that create the problem for a lot of people, allowing those to cloud their judgement of Conrad's attitude and opinion.   If you can take that step back and accept the words to be used as they were used in his age by white Europeans, only then can you see what Conrad was really saying 'when' he wrote this book.   You really cannot read this book as though it were written by someone in the 21st century for people in the 21st century.   It's a piece of history written a long time ago, read it as such.

So considering that, from my perspective, Conrad is very clearly appalled with the worse of white Europeans descending upon the peoples of Africa appearing almost deity like -- and exploiting that appearance to the maximum -- simply due to their modern technology, their equipment, their immaculate white clothes in a hostile environment of sweat and mud.   What chance would any person who has lived a natural life in a completely natural world have of remaining unaffected by the power and influence over the natural world that white Europeans had at their disposal?

Conrad makes clear that he alone, amongst the white Europeans on the boat, can see the humanity in the people's of the Congo, while others would just consider them wild animals.   How the sounds of the Congalese connected to a part of him, as only a human could connect to another human.

The only white person in the whole of Africa that Conrad wishes to speak to is Kurtz, the rest he seems to dismiss as arrogant fools and idiots who should never have been there.

One also has to remember that Conrad actually did go on this journey on a steam boat up the Congo to one of the inner stations, he witnessed what the Belgians were actually doing there, and he knew very well what Europe was being told about the people that lived there.   The most telling part of this book is simply Kurtz's last four words... 'The horror, the horror!'

When Marlow, the protagonist, finally arrives home and meets Kurtz's fiancé and she asks him what his final words were he cannot bring himself to tell her the truth because he feels it would crush her to know what he did in her name, as Kurtz only went there to win his fortune in order to be considered worthy to be her husband.   One can quite clearly see the metaphor here, that Conrad himself, when he came back from the Congo, didn't have anyone to speak to of the horror that he had witnessed being done in the name of the progress of European nations at the expense of those they dehumanise.   There seems to me that if we place Conrad in Marlow's place, we get to realise that when Conrad was in the Congo, he had no one to understand his feelings of horror, that he only wished to find one person amongst it all that he could talk to.   And when he came home to Europe how was he to explain to the people of Europe the horror that was being done in their name by the worse of them that they would send to Africa on their behalf -- and would they even want to listen?

So for me, this is what this book is, Conrad's description of what he'd experienced in Africa that he felt no one would, or could, listen to; that he felt no one he knew would understand.

If only he could have found just one person at the end of his own journey to talk to who understood. ( )

I read this for a class, and liked it. Would probably love it if I read it again (and didn't have to write a paper on it). ( )