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Nabaza.net-The MarketPlace - Heart of Darkness
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List Price: $3.99
Our Price: $3.99
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Prestwick House Inc.
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
EAN: 9781580495752
ISBN: 1580495753
Label: Prestwick House Inc.
Manufacturer: Prestwick House Inc.
Number Of Pages: 80
Publication Date: 2004-09
Publisher: Prestwick House Inc.
Studio: Prestwick House Inc.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was first published in 1899 in serial form in London’s Blackwood’s Magazine. Loosely based on Conrad’s firsthand experience of rescuing a company agent from a remote station in the heart of the Congo, the novel is considered a literary bridge between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. With its modern literary approach to questions such as the ambiguous nature of good and evil, the novel foreshadows many of the themes and techniques that define modern literature. This Prestwick House Literary Touchstone Edition includes a glossary and reader’s notes to help the modern reader contend with Conrad’s complex approach to the human condition.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Disturbing
Comment: This is a hard book to like, but I think it is very possible to appreciate, and frankly I loved it. It's dark, but the descriptions are beautiful and truly make this book work; they are what drives this terrifying and psychological plot.
Customer Rating:
Summary: consciousness awakening
Comment: Very complex and thought provoking, quite powerful and poignant. Excellent uses of symbols and motifs. I appreciate the value and importance of this book (probably 4 stars for this) and I definitely think everybody shoud read it , but I can't say I enjoyed reading it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Beautiful moments, and awful quarter-hours...
Comment: That is what Rossini reputedly said about the music of Richard Wagner, and a similar sentiment might be applicable to this novella. Wait--I take it back--not "awful"...but certainly...ponderous. Prolix. Demanding and uncompromising--in a way which is not really warranted, not perhaps necessary, but the author's prerogative nonetheless.
If you throw it away after a couple pages, I understand. However, unlike Henry James's The Turn of the Screw--which is gussied-up, ain't-I-a-weighty-writer? crap--Heart of Darkness is a true masterwork, and if you GET THROUGH IT, you'll come across some excellent stuff.
And at only seventy-two pages, you should manage.
Conrad, despite his unconcern for his readers' patience, DOES know how to create a classic character. Kurtz is such a one...and the suspense that builds over the course of the narrative makes the reader anticipate greatly his introduction. You're also left wanting more (and, when it's all over, feeling a bit short-changed), an attribute shared by other all-time classic figures such as Sherlock Holmes, Jeeves the butler, and Hannibal Lecter (before Thomas Harris sold him down the river).
The MLA claims that Heart of Darkness is the sixty-seventh best novel(la) of the 20th century (despite its complete and total 19th century tone, style, and atmosphere), and I'll go along with that. It's a much more significant contribution to literature than an impostor-work such as On the Road (ranked #55), but it may, however, suffer in the rankings due to its brevity.
My advice: drink some Mountain Dew, hunker down for a couple hours, and get this book under the belt.
Customer Rating:
Summary: No fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil. Inconsequential story by another Marlow (Charlie)
Comment: I was motivated to re-visit Conrad's early masterpiece by Sebald's Walk in Suffolk, which contains a bio chapter on Conrad with emphasis on his Congo experience, which was a traumatic one. Conrad had taken up the job of a skipper of a river steamboat, but he quit after a short time, in disgust with the colonial practices of the Belgians and their crude exploitation methods.
Marlow is Conrad's alter ego here, a captain who tells his story to some other guests at a dinner party. The party takes place on a ship in the Thames estuary around the turn of the 19th century. An initial narrator gives us the frame of the five men coming together for a chat and a drink and dinner. Marlow then takes over and tells us 'one of his inconsequential stories', as the introducer expects with some sarcasm: how he got the Congo job and went there with curiosity. He is appalled from the start by the crude colonialist violence that he observes on the African West Coast and then in the Congo territory itself, and by the raw greed of the colonialists. Kurtz of course, the main protagonist of Marlow's tale, who has not much of a 'life' role to play in the story, stands for the fallen white man, the one whose character cracked and who gave in to temptations and demons, his personal ones and from the world around him. He had the reputation of being a superior specimen, a man with morality and efficiency. The 'heart of darkness' is an ambiguous place and title. It can mean the center of the unknown inner Africa, but it also means the soul of the fallen man.(Kurtz is best known with the face of Marlon Brando and the whispered words: the horror! the horror! But Apocalypse Now transformed the story from Congo colonialism into Indochina war cruelty.)
Marlow's attitude is ambiguous, he thinks like a benevolent white man with an essentially racist attitude himself, but with a more 'humane' approach. He is realistic about imperialism: the conquest of the earth means mostly the taking it away from those who have a different complexion and flatter noses. He even takes history with a broader sweep: looking over the Thames at sunset towards the 'monster' city he is reminded of the times when this was a dark place for the invading Roman army.
The book is written in a remarkably opaque language. One struggles with every single sentence just to follow the story line. This is unfortunate, I am sure a more straightforward narrative technique would have opened a broader audience for the subject.
Conrad was a man who produced stunning visual effects of the mind with his inventions, but he was not a chief engineer of narrative simplicity. If one is looking for a good straightforward narrative, this is not it. If one is willing to take up the struggle, one is rewarded though. One has to wrestle meaning out of his writing, it is not a walk in the park. The style is highly contextual, every sentence implies worlds and assumes you know which ones. At the same time, he is also able to come up with pretty gems of sentences like when Marlow describes his steamboat: she rang under my feet like an empty biscuit tin, but she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape.
In line with the frame narrator's low expectations for Marlow's story, half of the audience is asleep by half way. I was not.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Heart of Darkness
Comment: An excellent work on the role of the imperial European forces in the shaping of the political and economic spheres in Asia and Africa around the turning of the previous century. Since these forces have been instrumental in the determination of the present day attitudes toward western powers, they must be studied carefully help in overcoming the negative aspects of what has resulted.
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