Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a book I've been meaning to read 'for real' since my senior year in high school. It is the one of only two books I have ever been assigned and not read completely. (The other is A Diary of Anne Frank and I feel horribly guilty over that one)
So, I started Heart of Darkness for my AP English class, like I was supposed to, and then got bogged down in Conrad's endless description. So, I skimmed the rest, asked my English teacher for 'help' because I, 'didn't understand' the message, wrote my thesis paper, and got an A.:) No one ever knew.
But, I always felt like I hadn't been fair to Mr. Conrad's book. I owned my AP copy, it's not even 80 pages, and I figured I could just read it and mark it off my slate of unfinished (shameful) reads. I even hoped that if I gave it another chance I wouldn't hate it so much the second time.
Although it will never be one of my favorite books, I will say that Heart of Darkness was improved the second time around. I liked it much more this time (although that isn't saying much, since I loathed it the first). One of my earliest concerns with this book is the narrative voice. The narrator and the storyteller are two different people. People are sitting around a fire, listening to a man tell a story about his trip through the heart of the African Congo, and one of the men around the fire is telling it to us. It's weird, and it makes the descriptions and language that much stranger, because really... Even back then, who talks like that around a campfire?! I don't really see the point, and I thought it made the story more stilted than it needed to be.
I also felt that a lot of the book was superfluous, which in a 78 page book is a problem. Nothing really happens until the end of the book. Now, I'm perfectly willing to admit my part in this. I know that I read this book faster than I should have, and that I missed some of the important parts to the story. But, I don't care. I still found a lot of it dull, meandering and pointless.
There is a surprising amount of depth to this story. I missed it entirely the first time, because I was intentionally blocking out any meaning to the story, and I think I barely touched it this time, but I was impressed by what Conrad is able to convey in just 80 or so pages (closer to 40 or 50 if you consider that I felt the first half mostly irrelevant). But, once Kurtz becomes an important and active part of the story, I think you can learn a lot. Although I didn't love this book, and I doubt I ever will, I'd like to read it at least once more to try and glean more because I think there is more that this book could teach me.