Recommended reading: Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad (1899)

 

Heart of Darkness

by Joseph Conrad.
 
Mass Market Paperback
First published 1899.
Published by Penguin Books.

ISBN 13: 9780140431681
ISBN 10: 0140431683
ASIN: B001KTM47C
 
Author Joseph Conrad based this novella on his own personal experiences, during a voyage up the Congo River in 1890.
 
This novella was the inspiration for the movie Apocalypse Now (1979), directed by Francis Ford Coppola.
 
Description:
 
Written in the last year of the nineteenth century, Heart of Darkness can be seen in many ways as the first twentieth-century novel.
 
Its climate of doubt and vagueness, its loss of moral confidence and its need for belief in the midst of spiritual wilderness, its exploration of the subconscious and its affirmation of individual freedom are all themes that were to have an influence on writers such as Orwell, Godling Céline, Borges and Eliot.
 
In Heart of Darkness Conrad unfolds the story of Marlow’s search for Mr Kurtz, the company agent whose ‘unlawful soul’ has been ‘beguiled beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations’ in his dealings with the natives of the Belgian Congo. Marlow’s adventure involves him in a crucial reappraisal of his own values. It is Kurtz, however, who attains to a vision of the inexpressible, terrifying reality of the heart in this extraordinary exploration of human savagery and despair.
 
Book cover image: The Steamer Stanley, by F. Hens.