"Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad

"Heart of Darkness" is a novella about Charles Marlow, English seaman travelling to Congo, Africa during the time of European colonialism (1890). 

He boards a ship at Thames in London and reaches the coasts of Africa where he comes across Company's employees bad mouthing each other, hating their jobs,  taking bribes and despising everyone. Bureaucracy, violence, racism, killings and disease is common and the whole experience is described by the main protagonist as "horrible and savage".

The novella is written using a huge amount of descriptive words and it's easy to get lost in it. It has a dreamy feel about it as if the one who reads or the one who writes has a fever. It was hard for me to understand who was who in the novella, where was everyone and what was happening. It felt more like a poem or some kind of transcendental writing.

The native inhabitants of Congo were described as scary, savage and barbaric, as if inhuman. I didn't feel right reading that. Just because the author didn't know anything about them and their life, he could have at least tried to go deeper in his thought as if to put himself in their shoes. 

However knowing the ignorant and superior attitudes of the materialistic Europeans in 1890, it would have been probably extremely hard as they judged everything from their own view. I didn't basically like the cynicism and superiority I could feel in the writing of Joseph Conrad. 

It was a very grim and dim novella. Perhaps that's how it was in 1890's. So, in a way, I liked that the author was honest about himself and the reality that he saw. By the way, Heart of Darkness was used to refer to the places that main protagonist traveled to. There was very little appreciation of the landscape.