"The Horror! The Horror!"
I just finished the first of my "novels for 2013" - oops - it was short and I finished early. It was Conrad's The Heart of Darkness, often considered the best short English novel of African colonialism. For balance, I also read the acclaimed Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe's highly critical review. Beside's closely paralleling certain event's in Conrad's life, Heart of Darkness was also the inspiration and pattern for Apocalypse Now , the parallelism extending to the names of the critical characters Mr. Kurtz (Conrad) and Colonel Kurtz (Coppola) and their respective last words. Conrad's narrator is a sailor named Marlow who undertakes a journey up the Congo river to relieve Mr. Kurtz, a charismatic character who's dealing seems to produce an incredible bounty of ivory. Achebe's critique of the novel charges Conrad with racism, mostly on the basis of his portrayal of Africans and Africa. It's certainly true that no African character...