Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness
Very sordid bleak read. It has all the elements of a mind on the verge of a phenomenal change - a change that will take its owner into a dark land of immense grief and languidness. At least that's the impression Conrad leaves you with after Page 23 of the novella. The narrative never ever speeds up. Its pace is that of a story teller who seems to have been so affected by the background of the tale he is spinning, he doesn't want to get to the point that wrecked havoc on him. So he slackens the pace at which he talks about the incidents as if he truly dreads arriving at even the remotest hint of what slammed him into a possible depression.
His descriptions seem to be a product of an imagination fed on lonely desolate islands and a feeling of aloofness from society. It's rather strange since Conrad travelled the world and was a sailor.
In more ways than one, he drives home the fact that the land was arid and so, massacred the senses of the foreigners who landed there. Apparently, in the land he talks about, even the most gentle people threw open their doors to a fanciful spectacular fit of violence....
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