I am very compelled by Heart of Darkness, not for it itself, but for the discourse around it. It’s truly fascinating.
Although I can’t denied, the story is masterfully written and well narrated in the audiobook I listened to. It wasn’t this particular one, but the one I found on Spotify had absolutely no voice actor credits and I couldn’t be bothered to search for another hour to find whoever narrated that version. (For anyone interested, it’s the one with a black-and white cover uploaded during the July of 2023.

 Difficult to rate because it's become more difficult over time to figure out what the book is "about". There are many scenes that seem to showcase the dehumanising impact of colonialism on the people of the Congo and the corruption of the colonisers - but the book is told from the perspective of a coloniser and the Congolese people are regularly dehumanised as is. This muddies the water - as does just how much we are supposed to agree with Marlowe as a narrator and how much we use him as a barometer for Conrad's intended meaning. Regardless, I think it does show the awful impact of colonialism pretty viscerally in a few scenes and the little time we get with Kurtz seems to be a good showcase of the mental impact of colonialism on the coloniser - how it drives him crazy and how he kind of begins to see himself as this weird goldy figure. Although, I do think Kurtz never really lived up to the hype that was built for him and much preferred the earlier scenes contrasting the awful consequences of colonialism with the business-as-usual attitude a lot of the colonists had as a more powerful representation of colonialism in its weird professionalism and sort of reinforcement of just how normal all these people committing atrocities were (by the standards of the time of course) to the weird semi-mysticism of Kurt. 

A bit boring and doesn't really go anywhere.

This was me revisiting this book for the first time since studying it in high school. I still find it to be such an incredibly interesting novel. To say I "enjoy" this book doesn't feel right -- but to say it enthralls me as a historical object is definitely true. 

idk why so many older novels take the premise of a guy telling a story. I cannot take it seriously. Their narrator goes into more detail than anyone has ever actually said in a story they told aloud. It takes me out of it a bit.

As for the actual story... There's so much detail about things that don't matter and vagaries about things that do. Marlow seemed to like Kurtz at some times, and I'm not sure why? idk, I don't feel qualified to give this book and actual meaningful review.

"The horror, the horror" should have been such a banger line, but it fell flat for me.