I hated this book in high school. Which seems like an odd reason to return to it a dozen-odd years later, but it really is because I hated it that I felt the need to go back. Especially since I'm in kind of a revisiting-high-school-literature phase at the moment.Plus, it's short. Which meant up front that even if I hated it again, I would still probably be able to plow my way through. Except that I was pretty sure I wasn't going to hate it. When I read this book in high school I lost the storyline almost immediately, and since it was a school assignment and I was busy with other things I had almost no motivation to go back and try to pick it up. So I ended up wading through the 80 or so pages without a clue what was going on, and by the end I was driven to skimming, which certainly didn't help. Since then, I have taken as a given that Heart of Darkness is a completely incomprehensible work of fiction.
And I know that's not the case, and that's why I was pretty sure that if I gave it a fair chance I wouldn't hate it anymore. What surprised me was how much I liked it. It did take concentration, but every time I realized that I hadn't caught the drift of a sentence or two, I made myself go back and refocus. And even then, there are still bits and pieces that I know I didn't quite get. But because I had to really immerse myself in the book, I felt sort of transported.
It's hard to do a plot synopsis for Heart of Darkness. It's a journey into the jungle, via river, in search of an ivory trader named Kurtz. But the story is more psychological than anything, about how a place acts on people and how people act in consequence of being in a place. I found it sort of fascinating.
I got my copy of the book at a used bookstore in Ann Arbor, and when the owner struck up conversation and I explained why I was getting Heart of Darkness, he said, "Some books age well." He didn't mean that the book itself stands the test of time, but rather that there are some books that some books do better as we ourselves age. Heart of Darkness, he said, was one of them. I agree. In fact, I suspect that most of the books from my high school days would age well. As I grow older, I just see and interpret the world differently, and it affects the way I read.
1 comment:
There were two books when I was young that I absolutely could not get through. One was as a child--The Wind in the Willows. I tried and tried, but I just couldn't. The other was A Tale of Two Cities. To this day I don't think I have ever made it through The Wind in the Willows. Many years ago, after I had devoured every other Charles Dickens book though, I decided to give A Tale of Two Cities a try again. Wow, I LOVED it! So, I guess that book did age well. Maybe I'll have to give Wind in the Willows ONE MORE SHOT.
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