Youth/Heart of Darkness/Typhoon (Modern Library)

By Joseph Conrad and Joseph-Conrad

Book Overview

Joseph Conrad came to writing after having been a sailor for nearly twenty years.??The three long stories in this volume were composed early in his literary career, a few years after a grueling... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0679424687
• ISBN13: 9780679424680
• Release Date: June 1993
• Publisher: Modern Library
• Length: 294 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 7.5" x 0.8" x 5.0"

Customer Reviews

Great Collection

This great collection has two of Joseph Conrad's excellent short novels (Heart of Darkness, Typhoon) and "Youth," an excellent short story. This is not only convenient but a great value, making the book a great buy for anyone who can track it down. "Heart of Darkness" is Conrad's most famous and arguably best work - not only one of the greatest short works ever but simply one of the greatest period. At once vividly realistic and profoundly symbolic, it on the one hand did much to expose the Belgian Congo's atrocities and on the other is a brilliant allegory whose precise meaning is still hotly debated over a century later. One would be very hard-pressed to find a text of such length with so many and various interpretations - nay, a text of any length; Shakespeare and a few other mainstays aside, hardly any other English language text has proven so malleable. It has been seen through lenses ranging from historical to psychoanalytic to seemingly everything between them - not least including biographical, as the scariest thing about the story is just how closely it is based on Conrad's experience. "Heart" is in many ways the culmination of early Conrad, which featured, among other focuses, a strong sea element and an emphasis on European colonialism in Africa and elsewhere. It fuses both into a dark masterpiece that works on many levels. Most simply and obviously, it can be appreciated as a sort of adventure story involving exploration and human endurance pushed to its limit; it has some fine suspense in this sense. Far more importantly, it is an unflinching look into the darkness of humanity's heart - a dramatization of just how low human nature can sink. This is most overt in the depiction of brutal inhumanity toward fellow human beings, but multiple symbolic layers make it all the more disturbing. Conrad shows that, for all civilization's supposed progress, the bestial instincts underlying humanity are only repressed - and quite weakly at that. It takes only an ostensibly primitive setting to bring them out, and when unleashed they can be at least as vicious as any wild animal's and worse in being malicious. Marlow's own harsh experience suggests all this, but it comes across most forcefully in the legendary character Kurtz. Like many ambitious but unethical Europeans of the era, Kurtz had no problem exploiting those in the Congo for personal gain, but the shocking conditions and enforced brutality eventually wear him down to the point where he snaps. It is debatable whether his days end in madness or some extreme guilt/shock combination, but his immortal final words - "The horror! The horror!" - sum up the whole story and all it symbolizes. The realization of just how bad things are hits Marlow so hard that he cannot bring himself to tell Kurtz's widow the truth, letting her think that his last words were her name, though he was so far gone that he had no time to even think of such things. As his final comment says, "It would have been too dark

This book is one of the most powerful books I have ever read

For me, "Heart of Daekness" is one of the most powerful books I have ever read. Even though it is rather short (about 100 pages), I have read it for quite a long time, since it is a very difficult book to understant. So far, I have read it twice, and I am only now beginning to understand it. It was (and still is) a joy to read it and it changes me forever.