Conrad carries this book along on the strength of his writing alone. For all the less-than-bearable floweriness of his sentences, there's also a precision to the images and abstractions Conrad creates. I don't know how Condrad can in one moment put you to sleep with his long winding sentences about dark gulfs and then slap you in the face with a few pages of intense emotion.

That said, this book did slodge along at times--the first half was a especially daunting in its slowness. He describes a nation in revolt, class war, and the thin line between greed and humanitarianism; but Conrad drains a lot of the excitement and suspense from this tumultuous subject. The symbolism and the questions which he presents are heavy and beg for a deeper reading. But with the slowness with which he unwinds the story it's hard to convince me to pick it up again. Maybe that's what makes Heart of Darkness such a work of art; it's digestable.

2.5

Unfinished notes:
This is the story of a silver mine in a fictional south american republic. Greed is the main strain of the book. The end seemed rushed. The revolution and the story of power interested me more than the craziness that avarice induces.

...
The ending to this book is heavily critiqued. I read something in the preface where the writer introducing the book lauded, calling it a masterpiece except for it's widely-recognized unsatisfactory ending. I also thought the ending was sort of a cop out. There was almost too much precision to it. It ended too neatly, like a fable. And the love plot line itself was something that seemed plopped on top of the many strands of the book. But it wasn't a terrible ending either. The author of the preface had to know that calling the book's ending a fatal flaw, is enough to make any reading vow to get to the end of the book. Almost like a trick. This got me through the slodge, but I saw neither the masterpiece or the flawed ending that the preface mentioned.