Faces
After reading "HOD" years ago, I discovered or came to understand that I could never get around this book. First, like many others, I enjoy traveling to dangerous and exotic places. Once, I hitch hiked through France alone, frequently sleeping in open pastures or parks. Often in the middle of night, I would wake up in the night and feel that sense of oneness with a universe that was at once hostile yet sustaining, a feeling that I found in Conrad's masterpiece. Second, when trapped by life, at the end of some existential tunnel so to speak, (Lost job, lost love, etc) HOD could bring joy to my heart. NO other book like it!

I was expecting much more when I purchased this book. A good read-maybe, a classic that all should come in contact with-no. I was expecting a classic since it is a required college book in many undergraduate English classes.

My book had not arrived in the time period stated and I contacted the seller and received no answer as of yet.

I was forced to reread this book after purchasing the more recent "King Leopold's Ghost," which I have also reviewed.

Even though Conrad's book was a novel based loosely on events he, or other had witnessed, the events in "King Leopold's Ghost" were not fiction at all, but the "real modern day deal."

It was this novel that was the first to expose the true horrors of European colonialism on the African continent. It tells the story of a supremely successful collector of Elephant tusks, which were being taken from the Belgian Congo for the purpose of trading them on the world market for ivory. Kurz's business was successful only because of the brutality and immorality of his techniques: He swindled, stole and killed Africans in the hundreds if not the thousands to stay ahead of the competition. And just as happened a generation later, by the diminutive and brutal Belgian King, no one asked any questions about his brutal techniques.

The phrase" The Heart of Darkness," referring to the heart of the white colonists, came to replace the phrase "darkest Africa" as a result of this novel. Its beauty lies in Conrad's failed attempt to re-humanize Kurtz as a symbolic image of redemption in the name of all the white colonists that had heaped carnage upon Africa.

But the author's efforts fell short both in the novel and in reality because in Conrad's hands, Kurtz was turned into "a less than ideal moral man." He became a man who learned to come to grips with the evil he had spawn, by discovering that he was not an inherently wicked man, but one who was god-fearing and capable of the "natural moral superiority" that the white man was supposed to have over the more savage Africans. The question of which man was the more savage was left "hanging in the air" in the novel.

Unless you are white, turning to "the white man's religion" where moral superiority is still claimed by fiat is not much redemption. But at least it is something. Apparently the novel did not have the desired moral effect in reality either, as history can attest. It may in fact well have had just the opposite effect: as the Belgians repeated the same ghastly and brutal experiment a generation later, only this time with diamonds instead of ivory. Despite all this, and the goriness of the content, it is still a powerfully told story by a master of his craft.

Five Stars

Heart of Darkness is an incredible Novella. Everyone Should read it. This review is not critical of the story, but of the publisher.

I own this particular edition of the book. It is a joke. The publisher, Faliquarian, shouldnt have been given a license to print this book. It is rife with typos, and wierd symbold that don't make any sense.

For example, where in the origonal story Conrad uses the words "...etc. etc..." to end a sentence, this copy of HoD prints it as "...&c. &c..." Yes, those are "&" symbols. It doesn't make sense to me either.

And in other instances where Conrad uses italicyzed words to emphasize something, this copy of the book uses...an underscore? So when COnrad emphasizes the word "you" this publisher prints it as "you_".

I sware I can't belive I paid for this.