About a year ago I read
Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad and swore that I would never read another novel by this author. At that time I found him boring, pretentious, and self serving. It seemed as if Conrad, like many of the so-called "greats", spewed words just for the sake of spewing words, paying no attention to good story telling. I still feel this way about
Lord Jim but I have since read
Heart of Darkness and I have changed my mind about Conrad.
With some of these classics it sometimes helps me to listen to them in audiobook format. It helped me cut through a lot of the excess bull and follow the story...or maybe
Heart of Darkness just had more storyline. I don't know, but I thought it was truly great lit and will stay with me for years and years. In a nut shell it is the story of a man who sells his soul to the devil and the words "The horror, the horror!" at the end of the book will raise the hair on my arms for the rest of my life.
I also avoided the movie "Apocalypse Now" thinking it was just another bandwagon Vietnam movie of the eighties, but my English major daughter told me that it was based on
Heart of Darkness. Hollywood did an excellent adaption of the book even with changing the setting and a few of the scenes. Sometimes it really is worth giving an author another try.
No comments:
Post a Comment