Heart of DarknessHeart of Darkness

This is the kind of novel that keeps working in your mind long after you have finished listening to it. It is compelling, exotic, and suspenseful, and it is far more than just an adventure story. It is a novel that explores deep into the hearts and dark regions of the souls of its characters, and into the conflicts prevalent in more primative cultures. It is also perhaps one of the greatest pictures in all of literature of the moral deterioration and reversion to savagery that results from man's prolonged state of isolation. Marlow, the story's narrator, tells his friends of an experience in the British Congo where he once ran a river steamer for a trading company. He tells of the ivory traders' cruel exploitation of the natives there. Chief among these is a greedy and treacherous European named Kurtz, a man who has used savagery to obtain semi-divine power over the natives.