I had heard this book mentioned a couple times and so I had it on my list for a month or so and finished it in one sitting. Very entertaining, the mood was very tense. It reminded me a little of Lovecraft’s style. The story follows a captain of a steamboat for an ivory trading company that goes up a mysterious river in Africa. The plot started to feel familiar to me about halfway through. Turns out it inspired the movie Apocalypse Now which I had just seen for the first time less than a week prior, one of those rando coincidences. So, there are many similar themes between that movie and this book. Here are some notable quotes to summarize the feeling:
“Do you see the story? Do you see anything? It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream–making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is the very essence of dreams…”
“It was unearthly, and the men were, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it the suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity like yours the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you so remote from the night of first ages could comprehend. And why not?”
This book also deals with issues of British imperialism, and rightly argues (as seen in the quote above) for the humanity of the African individual. This book has been called racist for not being supportive enough of the native people. It has also been hailed as an anti-racist book that speaks out against the mistreatment of black people. In my eye it is not really either. It does mention these topics but to me they weren’t the main point of the book. The main issue of the book is the eternal wrestling with the “heart of darkness” which isn’t a river in Africa but an individual inside the mystery and horror of existence.