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    Heart of Darkness
    Heart of Darkness
    Heart of Darkness
    Audiobook4 hours

    Heart of Darkness

    Written by Joseph Conrad

    Narrated by Scott Brick

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    Horror awaits Charlie Marlow, a seaman assigned by an ivory company to retrieve a cargo boat along with one of its employees, Mr. Kurtz, who is stranded deep in the heart of the Belgian Congo. Marlow's journey up the brooding dark river soon becomes a struggle to maintain his own sanity as he witnesses the brutalization of the natives by white traders and then discovers the enigmatic Mr. Kurtz. Kurtz, once a genius and the company's most successful representative, has become a savage; his compound is decorated by a row of human heads mounted on spears. It soon becomes clear that the demonic mastermind, liberated from the conventions of European culture, has traded his soul to become ruler of his own horrific dominion.

    Acclaimed to be one of the great, albeit disturbing, visionary works of western civilization, Joseph Conrad's haunting tale dramatizes the stark realities of Africa in the colonial period. Heart of Darkness reflects the physical and psychological tragedies that Conrad had experienced while working in the Belgian Congo in 1890. It is also the basis of Francis Ford Coppola's Academy Award–winning film Apocalypse Now.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJul 28, 2008
    ISBN9781400178469
    Author

    Joseph Conrad

    Polish-born Joseph Conrad is regarded as a highly influential author, and his works are seen as a precursor to modernist literature. His often tragic insight into the human condition in novels such as Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent is unrivalled by his contemporaries.

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    Reviews for Heart of Darkness

    3.5/5

    163 ratings142 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Hypocrisy of imperialism. A good companion read to Things Fall Apart and The Poisonwood Bible. Tells the the story of Marlow, a sailor who describes his journey up the Congo River to meet Kurtz. Mans journey to discover the darkness in his own hearts. (Foster) Inspired by a trip Conrad took up the Congo in 1890. Major conflict; their images of themselves as civilized and the temptation to abandon morality when out of European society. Kurtz has completely abandoned European morals and norms. Also recommend King Leopold's Ghost.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      I have a confession to make. I bought this book simply because I loved the cover, which you actually have to see in person to fully appreciate, and because it has deckled edge pages. Shallow, I know. However, after reading Katie's thoughts on it over on her thread, I decided to give it a go sooner rather than later. Lucky me - this is one of those rare books that pull you into its pages and won't release you until you have finished the last word on the final page. Entrancing...riveting...without one misplaced word. A tale of dark adventure..."Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a giant silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of the sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of overshadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once- somewhere- far away- in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect."
    • 3/5
      Arrows, by Jove! We were being shot at!
    • 4/5
      Marlow recounts his time as a steamer captain in the interior of Africa; and his meet-up with the enigmatic Kurtz. The story was much more caustic in tone and raw in setting than I remembered it as having been; and it's hard not to picture 'Apocalypse Now' while the story spools out; but it's a rich evocative story more than capably narrated by Kenneth Branagh. I know celebrity narrators can be an issues; but he told the story with just a touch of color, without over-doing it.
    • 2/5
      First of all, I'd like to state that the real reason why I started reading this book was because of the game Spec Ops: The Line (my current favorite one), which was apparently based on it. So right to begin with, if you played the game you'll probably know what I was expecting of this book: something less complicated and more explicitly mind-blowing. What I got in the end was a book that I did not understand, thus the low rating I gave it.
      Please notice that I did not hate the book, the reason why I disliked it is because it was difficult to understand rather than "I was expecting something similar to the game". The narrative is different from the books I'm used to read. I had to re-read several passages over and over again until I finally gave it up and decided to move on regardless if I did or did not get the meaning of everything the main character said. There is character development in the book, and I assume it's a strong one, but it's so goddamned implicit that I think I went over it and did not notice anything unusual. Heck, I was too busy trying to understand the plot itself to actually be able to figure what was going on with the characters. As I result, I probably got neither of them right. Was there anything about a change of personalities or main goals or priorities?

      Seriously, like Tales of a Tub, I'm pretty sure this book is splendid. Too bad I don't have enough patience to cope with the classic writing style.
    • 5/5
      This book is so very well written that many aspects of it seem to me to verge on perfection. It springs to mind a hundred times in discussing writing craft, in discussing what a story should do, how framing can work, or indeed, when contemplating John Gardner's theory that novellas at their best have a "glassy perfection". This book manages to be an experience as well as a literary work, and the effect of its final pages is profound, worthwhile, and haunting.
    • 4/5
      This is the second time I've started this book. I tried to read it in my late teens but could not deal with the brutality toward the Africans by the Europeans. I'm not sure that the "darkness" Conrad refers to is the same "darkness" I see in the book. For me this is about the attitude and actions of the colonists / company men toward the native tribes' people. But I get the feeling that Conrad's contemporary readers (at time of publication) would have been more horrified at the way Kurtz "went native" so to speak.
      One paragraph did really stand out for me and in it Conrad says (paraphrase)who would we be if we didn't have the judgement of our neighbours / friends / family / society around us; if we were completely free of all expectations and only had our own morality to guide us? How many people obey the rules for fear of what society would do to them if who they really are were to show?
      The darkness that will stay in my head is the wholesale destruction of a native society for greed and profit - a destruction that continues today in that area of the world.
    • 4/5
      The fiction, and the non-fiction. The prose are not for the unexperienced reader. Part of this great story explains of the ills of colonialism at the turn of the century. It posits probably, an accurate account of what one may have seen on the ground and "up country" at that time. Conrad certainly opens the pages of man's baseness, his sordidness. I eagerly anticipate reading his other works.
    • 3/5
      I read this book in high school and appreciated it, but made no personal connection. Interesting story, but no plans to pick it up ever again.
    • 3/5
      Uiteraard een klassieker, maar desondanks zeer intrigerend. Sterk accent op stemming en sfeerschepping: duister, mysterieus.Maar stilistisch meestal grote omhaal van woorden en daardoor niet helemaal geslaagd.Te lezen als ultieme explorie van het innerlijk van de mens in extreme omstandigheden
    • 2/5
      I finished Joseph Conrad’s novella, “Heart of Darkness” this morning. I’m really a bit Ho-hum about it, can’t really recommend it.
    • 3/5
      This book is racist and sexist, but it's extremely interesting to think about.I could write a lot about it, but I'm reading it for class and have done plenty of that. Just wanted to record that I've read it recently.
    • 1/5
      I have never hated a book more. It was just. Awful. Plain and simple. I've never encountered a less accessible text where nothing happens. One star is generous.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book but don't think I fully appreciated it for what it is. I allowed myself to become immersed in a wonderful story without ever looking below the surface of the story, despite the fact that I could see something written there. I'll have to re-read this at a later date.
    • 5/5
      Jaysus, this book is a brutal little thing.
    • 5/5
      A life changing book for those with angst. In my top 5.
    • 3/5
      Only really read it because of Apocalypse Now and found it rather hard going. Interesting the old descriptions of an ancient jungle race (savages etc) and the contrast and shock that it had on the 'sopisticated' European narrator from the developed world.
    • 3/5
      Conrad paints a vivid picture of the heart of darkness which is the mind of man.
    • 1/5
      Read together with State of Wonder for book club. Heart of Darkness, set in the early 1900s, is narrated by Marlow, a sailor who journeys to Africa under the employment of the Company, a Belgian outfit conducting trade in the Congo. Marlow’s journey is a journey into “the horror” of imperialism. Natives of the Congo are brutalized by Company agents and forced into Company service; the resplendent natural resources of the country are raped for profit. In the heart of the Congo, Marlow meets Kurtz, a reputed Company Chief who represents humanity’s capacity for evil. They return to port and then onto Europe.Marlow listens to Kurtz talk while he pilots the ship, and Kurtz entrusts Marlow with a packet of personal documents, including an eloquent pamphlet on civilizing the savages which ends with a scrawled message that says, “Exterminate all the brutes!” The steamer breaks down, and they have to stop for repairs. Kurtz dies, uttering his last words—“The horror! The horror!”—in the presence of the confused Marlow. Marlow falls ill soon after and barely survives. Eventually he returns to Europe and goes to see Kurtz’s Intended (his fiancée). She is still in mourning, even though it has been over a year since Kurtz’s death, and she praises him as a paragon of virtue and achievement. She asks what his last words were, but Marlow cannot bring himself to shatter her illusions with the truth. Instead, he tells her that Kurtz’s last word was her name..
    • 2/5
      This classic book has been sitting on my ereader for ages as something I felt I ought to have read. I picked it up this week in a gap between library books. One of the reasons I hadn't read it before was that I was worried it would be graphically violent - knowing how brutal the colonial regime in the Congo was.In fact the violence in the book is much less vividly described than I expected; the horrors are more psychological than physical in nature and there's a lot of heavy symbolism about darkness and light and the nature of the colonial enterprise and the heavy toll it took on all concerned.
    • 4/5
      Am I the only one that hasn't seen Apocalypse Now? Anyways... ahh, Belgian history. Sure, it's racist - that's imperialism. This is Marlow's great seaman's tale in the Congo, heading to uncharted territory in the heart of darkness to find the legendary Kurtz. For all the build-up, though, I found myself wanting more of him. Guess I'll have to watch the damn movie.
    • 3/5
      But for the manner of its telling, this could have become one of my favourite books.I'm already a big fan of Apocalypse Now, even though I realise there's only a tenuous link between the book and the film. I think the theory behind both is the same - a man lost in an alien land, in a culture that cannot be grasped, and the men sent to retrieve him. The horror, et cetera.What I dislike is that the novel is narrated to us - it isn't just narrated, but we are one of a group of sailors sat around in the middle of the night listening to the story as it is told. Interjections are reported, interrupting the flow of the narrative, which itself is presented in the text with every line appearing in speech marks. Oh the horror indeed! Why did Conrad choose to make this such a painfully difficult book to read?
    • 2/5
      I read this book in conjunction with the film, Apocalypse Now, in twelfth grade. The teacher said that it would be "the hardest book we ever read". I would like to read this book again because I feel like I really missed something the first time.
    • 2/5
      Oh dear, I always feel so guilty when I don't care for a classic.I'm not sure how much difference there was between Joseph Conrad and his protagonist Marlow, but it is very difficult for my twenty-first century sensibility to get around the casual racism and misogynism which is further compounded by Marlow's unrelenting contempt for his fellow white men both in the Congo and in England. In fact, the only people he has any admiration for are Kurtz and Kurtz's "intended". We are told repeatedly about Kurtz's specialness, magnetism and great plans, but no details as to why this should be so, other than his talents as a musician, painter, and thinker. Furthermore, when Marlow meets Kurtz's fiancée, he waxes lyrically on her character and motives, all based only on a fleeting interview.There are some wonderful descriptive moments; I particularly liked the image of two station employees dragging their shadows behind them. Also, the ending, which I will not give away, has a certain poignancy. However, I have no plans to tackle this again.I should point out that this particular audio edition won awards, no doubt deserved. Otherwise, I might have loathed this book.
    • 4/5
      I ended up liking this book quite a bit but I almost wonder if its reputation isn't somewhat inflated (specifically regarding the subsequent adaptations such as Apocalypse Now) ~ I would not call it a masterpiece or even "great." But for a novella I will say, it packs a whallop, and it is beautifully written for the most part. Due to the tertiary stacking of narration (the unnamed narrator, then Marlow, then Kurtz at times), one has to read quite carefully to know when narrators switch and it's not always done gracefully. It is choppy at times. However, I got into the pulse of it. It is stunning to me that English is Conrad's third language (which he learned in his 20s) because some of the passages have a spare and eloquent beauty, evidencing a brilliant command of the written English word as per someone native to it. But the story and portrayal of the Congolese people, while sad, seems rather honest for that time ~ as a European of his day accurately stating what he thought, saw and experienced. My big, big complaint is that insipid ending (the fiance part), egads, seriously? That took it down a huge peg and ended up saying nothing about the symbolism and themes throughout the preceding events. It seemed, in one page to ridicule, or put down, the women of the time, as buffoonish simpletons. Ah well, overall a really interesting travel down the Congo during the violent, oppressive ivory trade and the "hearts of darkness" that lie within human beings, and the places they inhabit (by way of the Congo and Thames Rivers).
    • 3/5
      While the style and prose is very well done. I just didn't felt any type of connection with the characters to give this book 4 stars
    • 4/5
      Great setting, atmosphere and feel for the time - sick natives just being left to die in a clearing, the long, enforced stay at the colonial trading post in the middle of the jungle, chugging along on a dodgy steamboat trying to steer clear of the unfathomable tree line passing by at a snail's pace - all threaded with a slow build up of tension. I need to read it again when I get the chance because I didn't quite feel the awe and mystery that was supposed to surround the feted ivory trader/agent, Kurtz.
    • 1/5
      Umm.. "Interesting". I found it almost incomprehensible.
    • 3/5
      Damn good catalyst.
    • 2/5
      That was a tough read man...a tough read.