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itsmjn 's review for:
Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
slow-paced
I went into this with the expectation that it would make me consider the same things everyone talks about with this novel. How racist is the depiction of black people? Is that depiction what the author thinks or just the thoughts of an unreliable narrator? Is this text anticolonial? Should this text be taught in universities?
Unfortunately for me, I did not have time to consider any of these factors in any amount of detail. I was too distracted by something much more surface level: prose so overwrought and redundant that it made any further analysis of the more interesting elements impossible. Conrad has the vocabulary required to pull off what he's attempting, but not the restraint. A sentence will be almost good, almost meaningful and evocative and memorable, and then Conrad will just decide to string more nouns onto the end of it, ruining the rhythm and the impact. He's also immensely fond of using three or four adjectives to describe a single trait, and by trying to drive his point home he simply irritates me instead. Air in a jungle does not need to be warm, thick, heavy *and* sluggish, one of those would do.
I cannot overstate how much the entire book reads like the ramblings of someone who is convinced he's got something to say, but really doesn't. You can't just say inexorable. You can't just say Heart and Darkness over and over again like you're writing the fucking Kingdom Hearts wiki. You have to have a point. Conrad doesn't.*
*Addendum: I have thought about it more and I don't think it's fair to say he has nothing to say. There is a ton of stuff to pick apart and discuss in this book. I do however also think that the style with which he makes this point is so horrendous that the point mostly gets lost. The metaphors are so overused, so overly descriptive, that they leave you thinking none of what he just said has any meaning whatsoever. There is meaning there, but Conrad tries so hard to have every single sentence be an all time banger of a description that it just ends up over-written. You could clean the style up with heavy editing and this book would have a much stronger core (or heart?).
This is a theoretically good book, executed poorly.
Unfortunately for me, I did not have time to consider any of these factors in any amount of detail. I was too distracted by something much more surface level: prose so overwrought and redundant that it made any further analysis of the more interesting elements impossible. Conrad has the vocabulary required to pull off what he's attempting, but not the restraint. A sentence will be almost good, almost meaningful and evocative and memorable, and then Conrad will just decide to string more nouns onto the end of it, ruining the rhythm and the impact. He's also immensely fond of using three or four adjectives to describe a single trait, and by trying to drive his point home he simply irritates me instead. Air in a jungle does not need to be warm, thick, heavy *and* sluggish, one of those would do.
I cannot overstate how much the entire book reads like the ramblings of someone who is convinced he's got something to say, but really doesn't. You can't just say inexorable. You can't just say Heart and Darkness over and over again like you're writing the fucking Kingdom Hearts wiki. You have to have a point. Conrad doesn't.*
*Addendum: I have thought about it more and I don't think it's fair to say he has nothing to say. There is a ton of stuff to pick apart and discuss in this book. I do however also think that the style with which he makes this point is so horrendous that the point mostly gets lost. The metaphors are so overused, so overly descriptive, that they leave you thinking none of what he just said has any meaning whatsoever. There is meaning there, but Conrad tries so hard to have every single sentence be an all time banger of a description that it just ends up over-written. You could clean the style up with heavy editing and this book would have a much stronger core (or heart?).
This is a theoretically good book, executed poorly.