Just read Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. I guess everyone else read it in school, but I rarely read anything I was supposed to back then.
I almost always find that most famous books are famous because they’re really good. I’m talking about famous books that have lasted through decades or centuries. Dickens comes to mind.
In this case, I don’t get it. The story is short, but I kept wishing it were really long. That’s because if it were really long, I would have stopped reading it once I realized that it wasn’t getting better or going anywhere interesting.
Instead, I kept thinking, “oh, hey, I’m almost finished, so let’s just push on through.”
I’m not saying that Conrad can’t write. Let’s face it, the man can turn a phrase, and he can describe a scene powerfully. But where’s the story? And all the dread (“the horror, the horror”) is heavily talked around, but without any solid item to support it. We’re supposed to take the dread on faith.
But I have no faith. I need the writer to take me down the path. At the very least, to give me enough to imagine what the path looks like.
I read Lord Jim first, and didn’t care for it. Actually, I thought the first part was interesting, but I lost interest in the second part where Jim fulfills the destiny that he failed to live up to in the first part.
So I never picked up Heart of Darkness until I watched Apocalypse Now and figured I ought to, if for no other reason that to try and make a little more sense out of that pointless (but fascinating) movie. I discovered that a pointless novella doesn’t actually deepen your understanding of a pointless movie.
But that’s just me.
Ugh, Heart of Darkness was the worst of the school-assigned books. I thought it would never end (short as it is), and I didn’t even understand enough of it to bs about it without finishing it. Worse than Bleak House, and that’s saying something.
Kevin, it isn’t just you. I actually enjoyed both the movie and the book, but they were so far divorced that the book didn’t make the movie any more significant. Light entertainment only.
Like Rob, I avoided the assigned books all through school. Too many “classics” turn out to be worthless (Shane, try Madame Bovary for a new low), and even the good ones lose too much being digested by the machinery of education. I wonder if I read The Old Man and the Sea today, without the edutrimmings, would it really be as bad as I remember? I like Papa’s writing, but that was awful when I was forced to read it.
I liked The Old Man and the Sea, but I dig what you’re saying. Never read Bleak House. Sounds… bleak.