Heart of Darkness (1899) by Joseph Conrad

Less a novella than an essay ruminating upon the man-made hell that was Africa during the colonial era, Heart of Darkness suffers from a lack of readability due to both its framing device and Conrad's seeming dislike of paragraph breaks. Look, I've read some difficult stuff. I'm halfway through the King James Bible, I've read Shakespeare, some Joyce, etc. So although I'm not nearly as well-read as a lot of the more prominent reviewers on this website, I can still stick it out and complete (and enjoy my experience reading) a lot of more difficult literature. Rarely have I ever zoned out and skim, mind wandering, as much as I did in this book.

Conrad can certainly write, as portions of this book are quotable in their beauty, and his foreword in my Penguin Deluxe edition was stunningly well-worded, but it seems to fall apart in most of Heart of Darkness as Marlow, the narrator, drones on endlessly and tends to add details that stall the story more than add depth to the themes he's exploring. I couldn't shake the feeling that this should have been a short story rather than the novella it is. It manages to feel bloated despite its short length.

There are some important ideas discussed here: The evils of colonialism, for sure. And Conrad probably was one of the first to depict it as such. And, perhaps even more compelling since it's as timeless as anything worth writing about: The cruelty men exhibit to their fellow man when allowed to act maliciously without consequence, and the faux justification of such acts provided by faith in racism and misogyny that gave way to the Western pseudosciences of the 19th and 20th century such as eugenics and phrenology. But the process in which Conrad says what he wants to say made it a chore to access his thoughts on such themes and I had to constantly refocus my efforts to the extent that made this 89-page novella feel three times its length. In the end, I abandoned my read at around 50 pages and consulted a summary instead. For shame, I know.

It's extremely rare for me not to put in the effort to finish a piece of classic literature. So rare in fact that I've only ever done it once before, during my read of Paulo Coehlo's The Alchemist, which I despised. But I just can't do it. I'm sorry, I tried, and Conrad deserves it, but I've failed. I tried in audio form while I work, I tried sitting by the fire with music early in the morning when my brain was fresh, I tried in bed late at night when winding down. But I can't focus my brain enough to trudge through Conrad's bloated, uninteresting prose to get to the good stuff.

I hate calling media "important", but this is probably an important book. It's just too bad it's not more accessible than it is for the mouth-breathers like me. I'm receptive to what it has to teach but I've lost patience for the method in which it does it.

Sorry, Joseph.

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