I’ve been
trying to read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. It’s very slow going, but I
like what I’ve been reading so far. The thing that makes it such a slow read is
they way that it’s divided. It’s written in huge paragraphs that take up half a
page, and very little dialogue, because the story is told by a man who lived
it. It’s a story about adventure, and sailing away. The main character, Marlow,
is telling a story of how he came to be a captain on a steamboat on an
expedition in Africa. He is hired by a Belgian company, and begins his trek to
Africa. Marlow’s steamboat is somewhere in inland Africa, but needs serious
repairs after it got sunken. Because of this, Marlow’s stuck in a port (or the
Central Station) on the African coast. There, he meets the general manager,
who's a rather sketchy character.
I think the book itself is a look into the times during which it
was written. In the story, most of the natives living in the area were enslaved
by the whites that were industrializing that part of Africa (or at least trying
to). Seeing them chained up, worked to the brink of death really shook Marlow,
and should've shaken anyone else. The book itself was published in 1902,
and even though slavery had been abolished nearly everywhere else in the world,
it still existed in Africa.
I also
thought that the author of the book had a very interesting history himself. He
was born in Poland in 1857 as Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (and later
changed it to Joseph Conrad, because it was easier to pronounce-maybe), but
later his family was exiled to Russia because his father was arrested for
patriotic conspiracy (at the time, Poland had been cut up between Austria,
Prussia and Russia, and was completely gone from world maps for over a century.
Any type of patriotism in any part of what was under the control of the other
countries was prohibited.) After his parents died, he moved back to live with
relatives in Poland, and once was old enough, left Poland for good to go to
sea. There he developed his love and thirst for finding new worlds and
adventure, and he sailed all over the world, from the Middle East, to
Austrialia, etc. And he definitely seemed like an interesting character, even
without his traveling stories. He possibly was involved in smuggling arms to
the Spanish, he even shot himself in the chest, recovered, and became a captain
of a British ship. Later he became a British citizen, visited America, and
before he died, denied a knighthood. He definitely would’ve been an interesting
person to have at a dinner party (if those are still a thing).
