Review: Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is another book on my "I'll Probably Like It When I Get Around To It" list. And so I did! My understanding of the symbolism, and even the events, of this book are vague at best. (I try not to read anything about a book before writing a review, so I'm sure everything I write has been said.) It's compelling enough, and short enough, that I think I'll read it again sometime and put it together a little better. But here are my first thoughts:

Heart of Darkness is dreamlike, in its narrative, its cryptic urgency, and its otherworldly landscape. Conrad's prose is clean and direct, which gives the story strength and endless forward momentum through the mire, while only barely hinting at what deeper secrets lurk behind the veil. Everything and everyone struggles for power beneath the surface - the company men, the natives, the jungle, the river - except Kurtz, the enigma of the jungle who seems both all-powerful and powerless, at peace and at war. For how little he actually appears in the book, his shadow is cast on every page.

One of the most powerful parts of the story for me was the inevitable awakening from the dream-state, as the narrator is thrown back into trivial, repulsive life. I loved this:
"I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. [...] I tottered about the streets, grinning bitterly at perfectly respectable persons."
The inanity of civilization is at once miserable and charming. It is as "perfectly respectable persons" that we have to live, but who hasn't grinned bitterly at them once in a while? Finding these feelings put into words, and thereby understanding them better, must be one of the greatest rewards of reading.

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Review: Brave New World

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Somehow I got through high school without reading Brave New World. Thank God.

Of course it makes perfect sense as a go-to for English teachers everywhere, since it spews potential essay questions out of its eyeballs, and the characters are simple manifestations of their defining traits (Conformist, Non-conformist, Strong, Weak, Brave, New, Worldly, &c.).

I can also understand that for its time it was a more challenging and innovative idea, but sci-fi has come such a long way, and can be so subtle and emotionally engaging (I'm looking at you, China Mieville), that Brave New World just left me cold. That said, I always told myself I'd read it one day, and it was pleasantly short. Next!

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Review: Lincoln in the Bardo

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Saunders' book is part a dialogue between ghosts, written like a script for a play, and part a collection of brief citations of historical sources, some real and some invented, indistinguishably mixed. While this bizarre form may seem contrived or pretentious, it is the overwhelming variety of perspectives that gives this story its incredible power.

Speaking from a crowd of historical sources, each recounting their own version, distances the facts from the overall truth. I mean that the facts - whether the moon was full on a certain night, who was at the party, what was said to whom, &c. - are infinitely contested and therefore irrelevant; the reader must reject the idea of history as a tidy, known quantity, and accept that the truth can be understood without the facts being known. (How very quantum!) Further, that confusion is so much more true to life than to pretend that there is an agreed upon story of anything.

But! This is not a dense, philosophical book. Saunders' ghosts run riot. Funny, tragic, obsessive characters manifest their unfinished business with a bursting abundance of life force. Anything is possible in this afterlife, but these ghosts are bound by their human foibles. Surely any reader can imagine themselves among them. In the end, a wonderful story about the meaning of death and life.

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