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    Heart of Darkness
    Heart of Darkness
    Heart of Darkness
    Audiobook4 hours

    Heart of Darkness

    Written by Joseph Conrad

    Narrated by David Horovitch

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    About this audiobook

    “‘...he seemed to stare... with that wide and immense stare embracing, condemning, loathing all the universe. I seemed to hear the whispered cry, “The horror! The horror!”’” On a becalmed yawl in the Thames estuary, Marlow tells a tale of Africa. His job there is to find the enigmatic Kurtz, but his journey farther and farther upriver reveals the brutality of the white Imperialists who run the country. Established as one of the great English novels, and a story of mythic power, Heart of Darkness is rich in meaning – allusive, enthralling and haunting.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateMar 23, 2010
    ISBN9789629549411
    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

    4/5

    291 ratings146 reviews

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    • 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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Conrad's Heart of Darkness explores the dark heart that lies within each of us and the extraordinary lengths of depravity we are willing to go to. This is mirrored in the "dark continent" of Africa in which Marlowe, our narrator for most of the story, travels as well as in the darkness within Kurtz and, to an extent, all of us. The story also left me pondering the darkness that lies within each of us and whether showing that was the purpose of opening and closing the story in London with Marlowe telling shipmates about his trip to Africa. Are any of us really better than Kurtz?

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Strange and excellent. Conrad's use of the language is masterful. Full of incredible symbolism, and a very powerful anti-colonial screed.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      One of the finest novels of the twentieth century, "Heart of Darkness" is a moody masterpiece following a man's journey down the Congo in search of a Captain Kurtz. I saw the loose film adaptation "Apocalypse Now" before reading "Heart of Darkness" and feared seeing "Apocalypse Now" would detrimentally affect my reading experience. I need not have worried as the two are different enough to ensure the Congo's Kurtz was still full of surprises.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book has been recommended to me by a friend and was sitting on my to read list for years. When I saw that most of its reviews are either 5 star or 1 star I was intrigued. The book did not disappoint. Beautiful, evocative, mesmerizing, horrifying, revolting, it describes an abyss of a human soul. A story within a story, narrator's description sets the stage and his story takes you away into then disappearing and now non-existent primal world thus forcing you to see the events through his lenses.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Darkness in the dark reaches of Africa looking into the dark souls of man seeking the unknown, but finding darkness amongst the darkness.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      Jeremiah 17:9 sums up Marlow's message in Heart of Darkness: "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.Who can know it?"Though the book is less gruesome and terrifying than Apocalypse Now,it has a stronger reach for an imagination."...the sea-reach of the Thames..." > ah, how Joseph Conrad lulls us in.If not for the title, we'd feel nice and cozy, sipping our holiday tea by the fireplace. Marlow again tells the story, sounding not as chipperas he did in LORD JIM, leading readers to "...the very end of the world...."There's still the author's trademark racist descriptions of "blacks" andcannibals do not fare as well as in Moby-Dick. No wonder Conrad described Melville as "romantic."Where Melville gives us Cannibal Light,Conrad serves up Cannibals-with-a-Hint.Thanks to both of them for sparring us more.The story feels unfinished without knowing the reasons for the behavior of Kurtz and his descent into madness. Did his base desires and actions propel him or was The Horror in his mind?

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      This was pretty boring. The reader was fantastic but I just never could get into the story. Not my cup of tea.
    • 2/5
      I would have liked this more if I could have followed what was going on. Unfortunately, I was almost completely lost, which is saying someting about how difficult this book is. On the bright side, it's only 101 pages, so it is a rather quick read - if you can stop yourself from getting frustrated by the ridiculous amount of circumlocution. This book honestly made me question how much I liked Victorian novels, just when I was realizing how great they were.
    • 4/5
      Having just read a history of the belgian Congo I think I appreciated this book far more than I would have if I didn't know the full history of the subject dealt with in the book. As I could identify characters and situations within the book I was able to relate to it more.
    • 5/5
      Cartea în sine este superbă, cât despre felul în care este narată... Genial! E o plăcere să asculți!
    • 4/5
      In an effort to class up the joint, I listened to this audio book performed by Kenneth Branagh.

      I say performed, because it wasn't just a plain reading of the story. He added depth to the observations and took what I might have found to be a boring story and breathed life into it.

      I enjoyed this quite a bit and would recommend this audio version to anyone interested in this classic tale.
    • 4/5
      I finally read it! Beautiful, heavy tale of obsession.
    • 2/5
      This book lacks any subtlety in its transparent meditation on morality and purpose. Perhaps this book was a bold, groundbreaking novel in its heyday for its bleak observations about human nature and the ways men abuse each other. But the novel reads more as a philosophy dissertation than as the jungle river expedition of its premise. There are numerous scenes where the narrator is so involved with his longwinded diatribes about the way the world works, that the actual world of the book becomes impossibly imperceptible to decipher what is actually happening to the characters. This story is certainly a overhyped classic, and deserves to be best remembered at this point as just the brilliant "Apocalypse Now."
    • 4/5
      Lush language is the key differentiator of this remarkable polemic against atrocity. The framed narrative distances the author from the views expressed so it is hard to know whether Conrad shared the racism and sexism of Marlow, his protagonist. Taken at face value, the account of white colonists going to collect ivory from a white manager who has ruthlessly suppressed his black suppliers endorses white supremacy but not the ill-treatment of the lesser beings. Marlow objects to Kurtz's abuse of the 'savages' in much the same way that the English of the time protected dogs and horses.
    • 3/5
      I was a little dissappointed in this book but overall it was a good read. Immediately after reading the book I rented "Apocalypse Now" which was loosely based on the book. It had been years since I saw the movie and I appreciated the book and the movie more having seen/read them both.
    • 3/5
      I hate to say it, but I really didn't like this book. I know that it is a metaphor for something, but full realization of that metaphor eludes me, and I am really not that interested in discovering it. It was mostly the descriptions of everything, from people to the jungle to the banks of the Thames, that entrapped me--I probably have several pages worth of highlighted sentences, phrases, and paragraphs. Conrad has easily captured the idea of the phrase "hauntingly beautiful" when describing his characters and their surroundings and ideas.
    • 4/5
      The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much - Heart of Darkness

      This is a book that is difficult to rate. On the one hand, it is very hard to read. The perspective of the book is a person listening to another person telling the story, which means that almost all paragraphs are in quotes, which can and will get confusing if the narrator starts quoting people, and gets worse once he starts quoting people who are quoting people themselves. Add to that the slightly chaotic narration, the long sentences and paragraphs, and an almost complete lack of chapters (the book is structured into only 3 chapters), and then add some jumps in causality in the narration for good measure, and you have a recipe for headaches.

      On the other hand, the book has a good story. It has no clear antagonist, all characters except for the narrator are in one way or another unlikeable idiots, brutal savages (and I am talking about the white people, not the natives). It is hard to like any of them, and, strangely, the character who is probably the worst of the lot was the one I liked best, just because he was honest about his actions and did not try to hide behind concepts like "bringing the civilization to these people". He was brutal, yes. He was (probably) racist, yes. But they all are. He seems to show an awareness of his actions, of the wrongness of it, in the end, while all the others remain focussed on their personal political and material gain.

      I am not a big fan of books that are considered "classics". They usually do not interest me, and being forced to read them by your teachers will probably not improve your view of the books. I am not sure if I liked this book, and that in itself is an achievement on the part of this book: I am unable to give it a personal rating compared to my other books, because it is so different.

      There are many people who have liked the book. There are many who have hated it. I cannot recommend it, because I know that many people will not like it. Some would say that these people "don't get it", but that would be wrong as well. You need a special interest in the topics of the book, or a special connection to the book itself, to properly enjoy it. But I also would not discourage anyone to read it either.

      It is part of the public domain, so it is free. If you are interested, start reading it. You can still shout "this is bullsh*t" and drop it at any point.
    • 5/5
      I read this back in highschool, given as an assignment by a rather awesome teacher. I think that it tends to be a rather misunderstood book and people are thrown off by Conrad's ,let's say lack, of writing skills so that they do not get to the message of what "the horror" really is.
    • 3/5
      Arrows, by Jove! We were being shot at!
    • 3/5
      This classic tale is of much historical interest, but I have to confess to finding it an unappealing read. Initially an engrossing adventure, it becomes mired in perplexing moral scruples. True, predominant attitudes toward the issues raised here have changed since the author’s time. No doubt I failed to set those changes aside and consider the book on the terms that prevailed in its own era—a time of colonialism and the rampant exploitation or both people and nature in Sub-Saharan Africa.

      Heated debates over the novella’s alleged endorsement of racist ideology have raged since the 1970s. I can only add a personal impression: Amid the wholesale destruction of animal life in service to the ivory trade, and the heartless maltreatment of African workers (which the narrator, at least, seems to recognize as inhumane), the book’s ethical outrage seemed misdirected at the focal character’s betrayal of civilization. It is implied that Kurtz “went native” to the disgraceful extent of taking an African woman as his willing consort—a shameful fact from which his European fiancée must be protected after his death.

      Literary critic Harold Bloom has applauded Conrad’s talent for ambiguity. So perhaps I misread this work entirely. Or perhaps I’m wrong to impose my ethical concerns on a book published in 1902. But I suspect many contemporary readers will have difficulties like mine. It’s a challenge to appreciate the talent in a tale that so thoroughly misses the moral target it appears to aim for.
    • 2/5
      My Bookcrossing review from February 02, 2006:For those who aren’t aware of the fact, Heart of Darkness is the novella from which Francis Ford Coppola took his inspiration for Apocalypse Now. Seeing the film before reading the book was probably a mistake, especially when the film was so fresh in my memory, as I was struggling to find parallels between the two. Apart from the two main characters and the river, there are not a lot of obvious similarities. I actually think that Conrad and Coppola are giving us quite different messages, and that they focus on subtly different themes. I’m not much of an intellectual, so I’ll have to leave my analysis at that.Anyway, I managed to read this one in a weekend, as it’s only 110 pages, although it wasn’t exactly a light read. Conrad’s awkward and sometimes ambiguous prose made it more of a chore than a pleasure to read. Check out this convoluted sentence: "We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign - and no memories."The most interesting parts of the book were, for me, his descriptions of the scenery, which were quite evocative of the oppressive darkness of the jungle. I was disappointed that after the arduous journey to reach him, Kurtz doesn’t say much, and he only features for a couple of pages. The flaccid ending was also a let down. The only thing I can think of is that Conrad wanted the reader to feel the same dissatisfaction as Marlow might have felt.
    • 5/5
      This is easily one of the best five books I've ever read. The constant use of metaphors, anthropomorphism, and the portrayal of evil personified by Kurtz are so magnetic that as I read it I feel, alongside Marlow, as if the foliage is closing in around me and I'm starting to go crazy. Also, I very highly recommend "Apocalypse Now Redux," the film adaptation, which is one of the best book-to-film adaptations, and thus one of the best films, ever. It brings a truly tactile portrait of the foreboding aspect of nature to the tropes of the Vietnam war film, making it a wickedly unconventional slice of the genre pie.
    • 5/5
      Apocalypse Then -- the original one. He puts you into it.
    • 4/5
      Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is an icon of a book, and one that up to now I have avoided as my thinking was that it would be too high-brow, too literate for me. Due to encouragement from fellow Lters, I decided to give the audio version, read by Kenneth Branagh, a try. What I found was a moving, hauntingly troubled story that is as defining today as it was when first published in 1899. On the surface a simple story, but there are plenty of hidden meanings and allegories to be found on these pages. This journey into the heart of darkness is rife with themes about the evils of colonialism along with the corruption that comes with greed and power. Rich with symbolism, yet surprisingly readable, I was quite taken with Heart of Darkness. I can now understand why there has been such an abundance of “borrowing” from this story in many other forms of art and literature. There have been many who find Joseph Conrad a racist, and perhaps, by today’s definition he was. I prefer to think of him as more of a product of his time. Kenneth Branagh was an excellent reader, putting enough emphasis into his reading without over selling the work. His light tough and slight nuances help to bring the book alive. I can see why this classic book is considered a masterpiece revealing as it does the dark side of human nature, and it is a story that I will remember.
    • 5/5
      A Journey We All Must Take: When Marlow begins his journey to find the mythical Kurtz in HEART OF DARKNESS, Joseph Conrad dares the reader to accompany Marlow on a voyage less into the physical jungles of darkest Africa and more into the mental labyrinth that human beings erect to protect themselves from the horrors that they themselves build. In this justly famous novella, Conrad depicts a pre-politically correct age when white men thought it only fair and inevitable that they plunder the riches of Africa all the while comforting themselves that they were uplifting the fallen state of a lowly people.

      Conrad uses a twin layer of narratives in order to achieve the needed objectivity that he felt required to place the reader at varying distances from the horror that Kurtz cried out at the end. The opening narrator is unnamed, possibly Conrad himself, who sets the stage by placing the reader at a safe distance from the evils which lay squarely ahead. Through this narrator we get a bird'e eyes view of the true narrator Marlow, who is depicted as somehow different from the four other men on the deck of the Nellie. This difference in physical attributes slowly increases to concomitant differences in perspective, attitude, and general authorial reliability. Marlow is a deeply flawed man who has the disadvantage of viewing the unfolding events from the prejudiced eyes of a white colonial civil servant who is sure that the blacks in Africa are little different from his preconceived notion of uncivilized cannibals. Further, Marlow makes numerous errors of judgment along the way, many of them seemingly insignificant, yet the totality of the reader's perspective is twisted through the equally twisted lens of an unreliable narrator. Conrad's purpose in melding the reader to a flawed narrator was to insure that the reader could never trust what he reads, thereby increasing his sense of unease in that the sense of safety that Marlow feels, first on the deck of the Nellie, and later in the jungle itself, is as flimsy as the signposts that guide Marlow toward his goal.

      The goal is Kurtz, a trader who set out to civilize the blacks into accepting a white version of civilization, but Marlow finds out that the reverse happened. The true horror that Kurtz sees is the horror that all would be conquerors find when they discover that the philosophy of racial supremacy which led them into conflict with a people whom they deemed unworthy is shown to be built on straw. Kurtz knows that the only difference between his brutal acts toward the natives and their own similar atrocities toward themselves is no difference at all. As corrupt as Kurtz must have been, in his closing cry of horror, he finds a small measure of redemption and closure. Marlow sees what Kurtz saw, knew what Kurtz did, and heard up close and personal Kurtz's swan song of pain, but Marlow learned nothing of lasting value. All he could think of was to maintain the image of the Kurtz that was: "I remained to dream the nightmare out to the end, and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more." The journey that Kurtz took was a horror only because he became what he sought. The journey that Marlow took became a horror only because he learned nothing from what he sought. As you and I read HEART OF DARKNESS, we must decide which journey has the more meaningful signposts.
    • 2/5
      Heart of Darkness tells the story of Marlow, a sailor, who describes to his shipmates the unusual experience he had traveling upriver in the Congo and the effect it had upon him. Hired by a Belgian trading company as a steamboat captain Marlow's primary mission was to visit and, if necessary, retrieve Kurtz, a successful, idealistic agent who had lost contact with the company and reportedly fallen ill. As he travels to Africa and then up the Congo, Marlow encounters brutality, the racism and lack of compassion in the Company’s stations. The native are forced into the Company’s service, and they suffer from overwork and ill treatment. When Marlowe arrived at his station, he finds that Kurtz has set himself up as a sort of god to the natives he had once wanted to civilize; he has become more savage than even the natives, taking part in bizarre rites and using violence against the locals to inspire fear and obtain more ivory. This novella is, an exploration of hypocrisy and moral confusion. The idealistic Marlow is forced to align himself with either the hypocritical and malicious colonial bureaucracy or the openly malevolent, rule-defying and savage Kurtz. I found this a difficult book to wade through. The language is dense, the characters are unsympathetic and racist and at times the plot was just simply boring and plodding. 2 out of 4 stars.
    • 3/5
      Better than I remembered it, from my reading as a teen. I'll set myself on Achebe's side, though, when it comes to Heart of Darkness in relation to Africans.
    • 5/5
      This isn't a book that anyone reads for fun. Its not exactly a lighthearted meditation on the nature of empire, nor is the writing a breeze to slog through. Although technically a "novella," its also a solid work of literature and has loads of symbolism and multiple layers of meaning sandwiched into the story which the reader needs to work to unravel. That said, this is a classic--its a dark and brooding indictment of the futility of empire. Over one hundred years after its original publication, this book continues to provoke debates over its major themes, namely, the nature and logic of the British empire in Africa. Critics charge that this is a fundamentally racist novel and there are plenty of cringe-inducing racial comments over the savagery of the black Africans that Marlow encounters on his trip up the Congo River. We're also made to understand that these same tribes are so savage that they are quite literally beyond the redemptive power of Western [and white and male] civilization. Indeed, Conrad's condemnation of imperial enterprises stems less from the effects of the empire of black Africans and more from the damages it inflicts on the white people caught up in its ruthless expansion. Conrad links the expansion of the empire to madness and we see it most clearly in the character of Kurtz, but also in the inefficiencies, the lack of understanding of the jungle, the callousness with which the colonizers treat the natives, and their pursuit of precious ivory at any cost. The metaphor of darkness surrounds every aspect of this book--the natives are dark, the jungle is dark, the Inner Station is dark. The hearts of the colonizers are also dark, but the most provocative part of this book comes from Conrad's suggestion that the heart of darkness, the capacity for evil, resides deep inside each and everyone of us and we should feel compelled to examine the ways that we personally participate in our own journeys into modern day hearts of darkness.
    • 5/5
      A re-read, after many years. I'd forgotten how complex this book is. Ostensibly, its subject is Kurtz, a mysterious ivory trader, living far up the Congo river, a man who has allowed himself to become a god. Then again, it is the story of Marlow's trip up river to find Kurtz, and his conversations with Kurtz a man who has gone beyond madness. However, although Marlow seems to tell the story, there is a narrator who is actually relaying the story that Marlow told to a group of friends. And then there is Conrad, who made trips of his own up the Congo and whose letters and diaries reveal some similar episodes to those described in his novel. These layers give the book an ambiguity - we don't know whose truth is really being told. One of my favourite novels, still.