chumbers.

Note: This book is free and publicly available on Project Gutenberg .

It’s hard to believe that a book that, upon first reading, nearly put me to sleep would become one my all time favourites. After the first time through, I had no idea what it was that I had just read. And after many more reads through, it’s hard to say that I am any clearer on the full meaning of what Conrad is aiming for. Such is the infinitely dense, layered prose that he has produced here.

This novella is first and foremost an exploration of the folly of colonialism. If it were that and that alone, I wager that it would not have lasted the test of time as well as it has. No, there is a lot more going on here. What appears to start as late-Victorian version of a sea shanty depicting a simple voyage down the Congo river towards the mysterious Kurtz becomes endlessly more compelling when viewed from a psychological perspective. The river, a metaphor for consciousness. Kurtz, a projection of Marlowe’s shadow . And so on. Even the act of narration, the method through which we are told this tale, becomes evocative of a ‘talking cure’. We, the reader, are asked to play shrink to this troubled man’s past.

So enamoured was I by this reading of this text that I gave a lecture on it to the next year’s batch of literature students ¹ . Its exploration of language, of the human psyche and hypnotic prose have kept me coming back all this time later. My copy of this book weighs perhaps twice-fold what a fresh one might owing to the amount of my own pen ink that now lines its margins. This series is a culmination of those notes and represents some of the writing I was most proud of from my high-school literature days.