Okay so not really SF or F but never mind!
3/5 stars (should I feel quilty for giving such a renowned book a low rating?)
The style in which Heart of Darkness is written is something I have only come across once before. It is ‘written’ by an anonymous person documenting the story as told by the main protagonist; effectively it is a monologue. The only other time I have seen this style used is by H G Wells in The Time Machine, published just 4 years earlier and, frankly, for me at least, in neither case does it do much to enhance the reading experience.
Sadly, I found Heart of Darkness very heavy going; there are passages and sections of brilliant prose and then there are passages that I simply could make no sense of; words used that, for me at least, were utterly inappropriate in their context, adjectives that I could not reconcile with the nouns they were describing. Certainly Conrad does wander off in wild flights of metaphor, so maybe I just don’t have the imagination to understand the links that he has (presumably) seen between adjective and noun. Consequently there were some passages and many sentences that left me completely bewildered. And yet there are also those other flashes of sheer genius – “Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.”
Another niggle was again to do with Conrad’s use, or in this case overuse, of words. Some of this was undoubtedly deliberate – the heavy use of ‘heart’ and ‘darkness’ throughout – but some was just plain annoying; by the end of the book I really didn’t want to read the word ‘eloquent’ or ‘eloquence’ ever again or, for that matter, ‘restraint.’ If these other words were overused intentionally then I certainly could not understand why.
Throughout the book I found Conrad used language, vocabulary and sentence structure that I struggled with. Now I know he was born in Poland, and English was his second language, but he is often presented as “the greatest novelist to write in the English language,” so I can’t offer his Polish nationality as excuse. I have read a number of other authors writing around the same period with whom I had no such problems – Doyle, Wells, Wodehouse – so neither can I really offer the period in which it was written as excuse. But the result was, again, sentences that flew over my head with little, or sometimes no, understanding from me.
All of these complaints are a shame because the story itself is brilliant; a classic examination of the extremes of behaviour that can emerge from extremes of circumstances. A story that was, of course, famously adapted and updated for Apocalypse Now. So now I am left wondering whether this is, for me, a great book or a terrible one. Whichever, it is certainly an exceptional one.
3/5 stars (should I feel quilty for giving such a renowned book a low rating?)
The style in which Heart of Darkness is written is something I have only come across once before. It is ‘written’ by an anonymous person documenting the story as told by the main protagonist; effectively it is a monologue. The only other time I have seen this style used is by H G Wells in The Time Machine, published just 4 years earlier and, frankly, for me at least, in neither case does it do much to enhance the reading experience.
Sadly, I found Heart of Darkness very heavy going; there are passages and sections of brilliant prose and then there are passages that I simply could make no sense of; words used that, for me at least, were utterly inappropriate in their context, adjectives that I could not reconcile with the nouns they were describing. Certainly Conrad does wander off in wild flights of metaphor, so maybe I just don’t have the imagination to understand the links that he has (presumably) seen between adjective and noun. Consequently there were some passages and many sentences that left me completely bewildered. And yet there are also those other flashes of sheer genius – “Droll thing life is—that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose.”
Another niggle was again to do with Conrad’s use, or in this case overuse, of words. Some of this was undoubtedly deliberate – the heavy use of ‘heart’ and ‘darkness’ throughout – but some was just plain annoying; by the end of the book I really didn’t want to read the word ‘eloquent’ or ‘eloquence’ ever again or, for that matter, ‘restraint.’ If these other words were overused intentionally then I certainly could not understand why.
Throughout the book I found Conrad used language, vocabulary and sentence structure that I struggled with. Now I know he was born in Poland, and English was his second language, but he is often presented as “the greatest novelist to write in the English language,” so I can’t offer his Polish nationality as excuse. I have read a number of other authors writing around the same period with whom I had no such problems – Doyle, Wells, Wodehouse – so neither can I really offer the period in which it was written as excuse. But the result was, again, sentences that flew over my head with little, or sometimes no, understanding from me.
All of these complaints are a shame because the story itself is brilliant; a classic examination of the extremes of behaviour that can emerge from extremes of circumstances. A story that was, of course, famously adapted and updated for Apocalypse Now. So now I am left wondering whether this is, for me, a great book or a terrible one. Whichever, it is certainly an exceptional one.
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