The cover of the ReadingRate edition of Heart of Darkness

ReadingRate edition

Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad, 1899

153 pages · 38,005 words · about 4 hours · regard 90 of 100

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Marlow, a sailor, takes a job piloting a steamboat up the Congo River for an ivory-trading company. He goes looking for Kurtz — a brilliant agent deep in the interior, producing more ivory than anyone else, rumored to be ill. What Marlow finds is a man who arrived in Africa preaching European civilization and ended by writing 'Exterminate all the brutes' at the bottom of his own report. Conrad wrote this in 1899, when the Congo Free State was still a Belgian fiefdom and the atrocities were barely public knowledge. The novella operates as an adventure story on its surface and as something far less comfortable underneath: a dissection of how European men convinced themselves that plunder was uplift. Marlow tells the whole thing in retrospect, from a boat on the Thames, to men who made their own fortunes from empire. He never quite says what he means. The darkness of the title arrives before the jungle does — in the faces of the women knitting black wool in the company office, in the groove worn into the rock by a chain gang, in Kurtz's voice coming out of the dark. The horror he names at the end names nothing. That refusal is the point.

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