Writers you hate

[Mr. Tea]

110 pages long actually don't exaggerate.

You should know by now that luka exaggerates at least 180% of the time.

 

[Corpsey]

You're in good company finding it hard going (well, you're in the company of jenks, who's read everything ever written and you're in the company of me, a renowned thicko)

Finished 'Heart of Darkness', finally, after many attempts had faltered around page 20 in the past. Hacking through the thick canopy of adjectives is initially challenging but there are rewards hidden in there for the intrepid - though not at the end of the river where, like 'Apocalypse Now', the novella nosedives in quality, roughly at the moment when Marlowe meets Kurtz. I wondered if Conrad had deliberately made Kurtz so underwhelming, if the idea is that the great figure we have been led to expect turns out to be not much more than a rather sordid opportunist, a man incapable of restraining his appetites for adoration and murder?

I feel like that about Heart of Darkness - the longest short book I’ve ever read (and then re-read about four times. It never gets easier)

 

[Mr. Tea]

I should read it again, I think - I remember enjoying it, but in retrospect, the journey up the river is definitely the best bit.

 

[jenks]

Yep - I re-read The Secret Agent recently and thought ‘if you can write nice and clearly like this, why did you make HoD so fucking hard!’

 

[catalog]

Apocalypse now is actually better I think. Cos he simplifies it in a way. I think HoD is hard cos he's assuming you have read and understand a lot about the situation.

 

[catalog]

There's a sinclair book, I can't remember which one, where he explains conrad quite well. And the bits on him in rings of saturn are really good.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Just done 30 pages on the train this morning, enjoying it this time. It all depends what mood you're in I suppose.

 

[Corpsey]

Apocalypse now is actually better I think. Cos he simplifies it in a way. I think HoD is hard cos he's assuming you have read and understand a lot about the situation.

Not sure I agree with that, I think it's hard because its stylistically clogged and turgid. This is also how he creates such a thick, oppressive, portentous atmosphere.

Achebe on that:

These suggestive echoes comprise Conrad's famed evocation of the African atmosphere in Heart of Darkness. In the final consideration his method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. We can inspect samples of this on pages 36 and 37 of the present edition: a) it was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention and b) The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious, etc., etc.

The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew attention long ago to Conrad's "adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery." That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of artistic good faith. When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such under-hand activity. But Conrad chose his subject well -- one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths.

The bits I remember from HoD are haunting images, like the dying slaves the narrator discovers in the shade of a tree, or the gunboat endlessly (pointlessly) shelling a coastline.

 

[catalog]

Fuck off Corpsey you thick cunt. But yes, sounds like you are right and I am wrong. No one can argue with achebes take can they cos he is literally the only African who has said something about it.

 

[version]

 

[luka]

the best bit is the opening. the only bit any of you have read lol

 

[jenks]

Along with Achebe, I’d make my repeated claim that Lindqvist’s Exterminate All the Brutes is required reading.

 

[version]

the best bit is the opening. the only bit any of you have read lol

I've read it three times, once in a single sitting.

 

[luka]

as if!

 

[version]

heart of darkness is 30 pages long lmao

 

[Mr. Tea]

I've read it three times, once in a single sitting.

Remember that @luka is convinced he's the only person here who doesn't read by slowly moving their index finger along each line and reciting the text out loud, with a little audible inhalation between each successive syllable.

 

[Benny Bunter]

I read out loud or at least move my lips, good habit to get into I reckon.

 

[Corpsey]

One thing I envy parents is getting to read stories to them. Not the shit ones when they're toddlers, I mean when they grow up a bit and you start reading them De Sade

 

[HMGovt’s Glorious Return!]

I should read it again, I think - I remember enjoying it, but in retrospect, the journey up the river is definitely the best bit.

No, the best bit is when he sees a beleaguered warship and its malarial crew lobbing cannonballs into an indifferent jungle, before they even get to the river.

 

[Benny Bunter]

Tbf tea did mention that bit as well.

Lots of great lines, like the words of the old doctor who gave him a medical at the beginning of his trip coming back to him later in the jungle - "I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting."