The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad is a brilliant writer. His descriptions are original and beautiful. “The sea and sky were welded together without a joint.” “The very mist on the Essex marsh a was like a gauzy and radiant fabric, hung from the wooded rises inland, and draping the low shores in diaphanous folds”… both found on the first two pages of the novel. Conrad describes the Congo River  as “resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country and its tail  lost in the depths of the land.” Dealing with the agonies of imperialism and racism, it transforms history into art. Many writers and poets have borrowed quotes and storylines from this book, such as T.S. Eliot ‘s “The Hollow Men”, and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. The Great Courses, in their SKEPTICS’ GUIDE TO THE GREAT BOOKS, compares Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men to The Heart of Darkness, regarding their narrative point of view and style of broken chronology. This journey into the interior of the Dark Continent and the mind of Conrad is a journey worth taking as a reader.