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Heart of Darkness (Penguin Modern Classics)
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Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
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Our Price:
You Save: $ 10.35 ( 100% )
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Average Customer Rating:
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Heart of Darkness (Penguin Modern Classics) Description
Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780141182438
ISBN: 0141182431
Label: Penguin Books Ltd
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
Book Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2000-02-24
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Studio: Penguin Books Ltd
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9780141182438
ISBN: 0141182431
Label: Penguin Books Ltd
Manufacturer: Penguin Books Ltd
Book Pages: 224
Publication Date: 2000-02-24
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Studio: Penguin Books Ltd
Editorial Review of Heart of Darkness (Penguin Modern Classics)
Customer Reviews of Heart of Darkness (Penguin Modern Classics)
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: "Mistah Kurtz--he dead." An influential work on five 20th century seminal works
Review: I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.
Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.
Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).
I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!
As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Dense and difficult, ultimately rewarding.
Review: I'm sure many readers will find this a difficult read, the prose almost as dense and impenetrable as the jungle that Marlowe travels down in order to find his truth. Still, having only read it through once, I did get enough out of it to believe that further study will reveal some profound light in the heart of darkness. At only 100 odd pages, it does seem to have been designed by the author to be returned to again and again, small enough to swallow, but needing longer to fully digest.
Some passages are genuinely quite unnerving, with a sense successfully conveyed of a man who has cut away the veneer of civilisation, looked into the soul of humanity, and seen something truly disturbing. In short, this book is about nihilism, about the flimsy and shifting world of language that alone seperates humanity from the other animals (but only in a delusory sense). As the previous reviewer noted, Kurtz's power is almost wholly cast by his words, a potency maintained even whilst barely existing as a decaying, dying body. The story juxtaposes the power of language, through the dense tale spun by Marlowe of the mythical but ultimately physically insubstantial Kurtz, with the raw natural savagery of the African jungle and its muscular and visceral inhabitants. Language is what seperates the human from the animal, but in the heart of darkness, language, and through it civilisation, is revealed to be a false god created ultimately to serve animal passions.
Moreover, the novel contains the message that when man tries to shed his 'civilising' light on those judged to be savages, he merely succeeds in laying bare the moral emptiness of his own soul. Something to think about and to fruitfully connect with the war in Iraq, just as others did with Vietnam.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not a pretty thing, but an unforgettable sound
Review: The "conquest of the earth," which is the exploitation of one people of color by another, "is not a pretty thing when you look into it." These words, among the first spoken by Marlowe, prepare us for the actual experience of seeing into the "truth of things," which for Marlowe and Kurtz will be "the horror." But Conrad's fable is far more than an exposing of colonizing ways. Marlowe makes it clear that the real horror exists within the human soul and that our failures to recognize and enunciate its existence is the difference between being saved or damned in a world whose bright shining lies continually lead us astray.
In reading the story the first time, it's probably best to go for "content," extracting as much plot and characterization as possible from Conrad's multi-layered, impressionistic narrative. Marlowe says his mission is to make us "see," perhaps the motivation for Coppola's film adaptation, "Apocalypse Now," which like Marlowe's narrative is centered on three stations that mark Marlowe's trip up the river, his journey into the heart of darkness.
When reading the narrative a second time, ignore the plot as well as the "sights" Marlowe provides. Listen very hard to the words of Marlowe's narration. Notice the "tone." Marlowe will vary it, even in a single sentence, from amusing understatement to biting irony to sarcastic overstatement. When Marlowe encounters Kurtz, he finds less a visible human speciimen than a sound. And finally, in the last 5-6 pages of the novel, as Marlowe prepares to tell Kurtz' story to the'"Intended," the darkness will become so pronounced there is nothing left to see. It literally "screams" at Marlowe who, in spite of its injunction, can pronounce only a lie.
For many readers of the book, as well as apparently Marlowe's listeners in the narrative, the story will amount to little more than a lie, or an impenetrable narrative of foggy incomprehensibility. Sadly, literary art this complex, obscure, and disturbing will rarely reach the "intended," whether it's Marlowe's fiance or his audience on board the ship or the readers the author might wish to enlighten. But for the attentive listener who becomes caught up in Conrad's insistent and compelling music, the sound of the "horror" will take up permanent residence in consciousness, resonating with each new reading of this inescapably archetypal text--whether it's Conrad's version of the story or one by Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Hawthorne, Tolstoy, O'Connor, Welles, Coppola or, recalling even George Bailey's confrontation with the nihilistic abyss, Frank Capra.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: this is an over-hyped "classic": to be studied, but not enjoyed
Review: Wow was I surprized at the flimsiness of this book. Not only is it touted as the inspiration for the Coppela film, Apocalypse Now, but it is viewed as the precursor to the truly great novel by VS Naipal, Bend in the River. So I thought it would be worthwhile to read this book carefully.
What I found was an obscure story about a guy who goes nuts in deepest Africa and indulges in unspeakable atrocities to create some kind of order, at the least in his deteriorating mind. Alas, that synopsis might make it sound interesting, but the execution is so poor - and not even the writing is particularly good - that is isn't even fun to read.
It is pure nihilism, beyond atheism, beyond hope or even existentialism. Maybe this was viewed as original at the time it was written, but there is so much better that has been done on the subject since the 19C that this pales by comparison.
So I would not recommend this book except as a scholarly exercise. Indeed, there are few people I know who count themselves among the "well read" who have in fact read it. So many classics are like that!
Review Summary: "Mistah Kurtz--he dead." An influential work on five 20th century seminal works
Review: I read this book for a graduate Humanities course. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, written in 1899 is a seminal work about the ills of colonialism, as well as a postmodern look at the subject of mankind. Conrad's book had a crucial influence on five important works of the twentieth century: J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land, Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces, and Francis Ford Coppolla's movie Apocalypse Now, screenplay by John Milius, was based on Conrad's book. Another interesting fact is that this work was read by Orson Welle's Mercury Theater Players on the radio and was to be his first movie. After doing some work on it he abandoned the project to do Citizen Kane! I would have loved to of seen what Welles could have done with this story. Conrad's story is so riveting in part, because he himself served as a riverboat captain. High school teachers and college professors who have discussed this book in thousands of classrooms over the years tend to do so in terms of Freud, Jung, and Nietzsche; of classical myth, Victorian innocence, and original sin; of postmodernism, postcolonialism, and poststructuralism.
Just a taste of the plot reels you in! Marlow, the narrator of Heart of Darkness and Conrad's alter ego, is hired by an ivory-trading company to sail a steamboat up an unnamed river whose shape on the map resembles "an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail lost in the depths of the land" (8). His destination is a post where the company's brilliant, ambitious star agent, Mr. Kurtz, is stationed. Kurtz has collected legendary quantities of ivory, but, Marlow learns along the way, is also rumored to have sunk into unspecified savagery. Marlow's steamer survives an attack by blacks and picks up a load of ivory and the ill Kurtz; Kurtz, talking of his grandiose plans, dies on board as they travel, downstream.
Sketched with only a few bold strokes, Kurtz's image has nonetheless remained in the memories of millions of readers: the lone white agent far up the great river, with his dreams of grandeur,his great store of precious ivory, and his fiefdom carved out of the African jungle. Perhaps more than anything, we remember Marlow, on the steamboat, looking through binoculars at what he thinks are ornamental knobs atop the fence posts in front of Kurtz's house and then finding that each is "black, dried, sunken, with closed eyelids-a head that seemed to sleep at the top of that pole, and with the shrunken dry lips showing a narrow white line of the teeth" (57).
I especially became interested in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness from the movie Apocalypse Now. There is a scene in the movie that shows Colonel Kurtz's nightstand in his cave. T. S. Elliott's poem the Waste Land is one of three books on the nightstand. The other two are Jessie L. Weston's book From Ritual to Romance, and J. G. Frazier's book The Golden Bough. Anyone wanting to understand the movie Apocalypse Now, especially the character of Colonel Kurtz, and what Milius and Copolla are trying to tell their audience need to read these three books as well as Conrad's Heart of Darkness!
As a graduate student reading in philosophy and history I recommend this book for anyone interested in literature, myth, history, philosophy, religion and fans of Apocalypse Now.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Dense and difficult, ultimately rewarding.
Review: I'm sure many readers will find this a difficult read, the prose almost as dense and impenetrable as the jungle that Marlowe travels down in order to find his truth. Still, having only read it through once, I did get enough out of it to believe that further study will reveal some profound light in the heart of darkness. At only 100 odd pages, it does seem to have been designed by the author to be returned to again and again, small enough to swallow, but needing longer to fully digest.
Some passages are genuinely quite unnerving, with a sense successfully conveyed of a man who has cut away the veneer of civilisation, looked into the soul of humanity, and seen something truly disturbing. In short, this book is about nihilism, about the flimsy and shifting world of language that alone seperates humanity from the other animals (but only in a delusory sense). As the previous reviewer noted, Kurtz's power is almost wholly cast by his words, a potency maintained even whilst barely existing as a decaying, dying body. The story juxtaposes the power of language, through the dense tale spun by Marlowe of the mythical but ultimately physically insubstantial Kurtz, with the raw natural savagery of the African jungle and its muscular and visceral inhabitants. Language is what seperates the human from the animal, but in the heart of darkness, language, and through it civilisation, is revealed to be a false god created ultimately to serve animal passions.
Moreover, the novel contains the message that when man tries to shed his 'civilising' light on those judged to be savages, he merely succeeds in laying bare the moral emptiness of his own soul. Something to think about and to fruitfully connect with the war in Iraq, just as others did with Vietnam.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Not a pretty thing, but an unforgettable sound
Review: The "conquest of the earth," which is the exploitation of one people of color by another, "is not a pretty thing when you look into it." These words, among the first spoken by Marlowe, prepare us for the actual experience of seeing into the "truth of things," which for Marlowe and Kurtz will be "the horror." But Conrad's fable is far more than an exposing of colonizing ways. Marlowe makes it clear that the real horror exists within the human soul and that our failures to recognize and enunciate its existence is the difference between being saved or damned in a world whose bright shining lies continually lead us astray.
In reading the story the first time, it's probably best to go for "content," extracting as much plot and characterization as possible from Conrad's multi-layered, impressionistic narrative. Marlowe says his mission is to make us "see," perhaps the motivation for Coppola's film adaptation, "Apocalypse Now," which like Marlowe's narrative is centered on three stations that mark Marlowe's trip up the river, his journey into the heart of darkness.
When reading the narrative a second time, ignore the plot as well as the "sights" Marlowe provides. Listen very hard to the words of Marlowe's narration. Notice the "tone." Marlowe will vary it, even in a single sentence, from amusing understatement to biting irony to sarcastic overstatement. When Marlowe encounters Kurtz, he finds less a visible human speciimen than a sound. And finally, in the last 5-6 pages of the novel, as Marlowe prepares to tell Kurtz' story to the'"Intended," the darkness will become so pronounced there is nothing left to see. It literally "screams" at Marlowe who, in spite of its injunction, can pronounce only a lie.
For many readers of the book, as well as apparently Marlowe's listeners in the narrative, the story will amount to little more than a lie, or an impenetrable narrative of foggy incomprehensibility. Sadly, literary art this complex, obscure, and disturbing will rarely reach the "intended," whether it's Marlowe's fiance or his audience on board the ship or the readers the author might wish to enlighten. But for the attentive listener who becomes caught up in Conrad's insistent and compelling music, the sound of the "horror" will take up permanent residence in consciousness, resonating with each new reading of this inescapably archetypal text--whether it's Conrad's version of the story or one by Sophocles, Dante, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Hawthorne, Tolstoy, O'Connor, Welles, Coppola or, recalling even George Bailey's confrontation with the nihilistic abyss, Frank Capra.
Customer Rating:
Review Summary: this is an over-hyped "classic": to be studied, but not enjoyed
Review: Wow was I surprized at the flimsiness of this book. Not only is it touted as the inspiration for the Coppela film, Apocalypse Now, but it is viewed as the precursor to the truly great novel by VS Naipal, Bend in the River. So I thought it would be worthwhile to read this book carefully.
What I found was an obscure story about a guy who goes nuts in deepest Africa and indulges in unspeakable atrocities to create some kind of order, at the least in his deteriorating mind. Alas, that synopsis might make it sound interesting, but the execution is so poor - and not even the writing is particularly good - that is isn't even fun to read.
It is pure nihilism, beyond atheism, beyond hope or even existentialism. Maybe this was viewed as original at the time it was written, but there is so much better that has been done on the subject since the 19C that this pales by comparison.
So I would not recommend this book except as a scholarly exercise. Indeed, there are few people I know who count themselves among the "well read" who have in fact read it. So many classics are like that!