Heart of Darkness (1899) By Joseph Conrad -- Illustrated edition (2013) By Matt Kish

The publication of this edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is different than previous print runs of the novel in that it is/was an artistic release – it’s illustrated. And it’s not just illustrated, its every-other-page is a full color illustration, a visual rendering of the text on the facing page. All in all, artist Matt Kish’s treatment of the book is a fascinating, and successful, endeavor.

At first thought one might think the novel – a telling of an early-European exploration of the Congo River – is an odd topic for illustration. Conrad’s book isn’t a travelogue, it’s an intense psychological study of the mind of Marlow, the expedition leader, and of the mindset of colonialism. Yet, that is exactly why the illustrated-treatment of the story works. When Conrad’s book was written in 1899, Africa was "the dark continent" – nothing but imagination. No one (a.k.a. Europeans) knew what lay beyond the coastal areas of Africa. As a result of this lack of information, they created fantasy nightmares of the interior. These “white-man fears” (some real, some not) lend themselves quite well to illustration. 

I picked up this book because it relates to two of my recent reads: Into Africa by Martin Dugard, and a later Conrad book, the Secret Agent, written in 1907.

Dugard’s book is a telling of the Stanley & Livingstone story. In his epilogue, Dugard credits Heart of Darkness as the “first” telling of that story, a claim that proved debatable when I repeated it -- having now read it, I think I side with those who question that claim. Yes, Livingstone once explored the Congo, but that was before he got “lost.” And, while Livingstone studied the vast cultural difference (vis-à-vis Europeans and Africans), he did so as an explorer. In Conrad’s book, Kurtz (the so-called Livingstone character) was an advance guard of exploiters, not explorers; and Marlow (the Stanley counterpart) was a professional sailor, not an international journalist.

Comparing Heart of Darkness with The Secret Agent is another issue. These are two vastly different storylines, yet both are told with Conrad’s exhaustive/exhausting writing style. The author is enamored with compound sentences that often come across as run-ons, endless run-ons. Yet, when one is telling the story of a living nightmare, a fast-paced endless run-on works.

Recommendation: Interesting from two standpoints, its illustrated treatment of a classic; and as documentation on the western mindset about Africa – in this case negative (contrasting sharply with the Tarzan treatment a few years later).  

Click on Amazon to purchase this book.

Dubliners (1904-1907) By James Joyce

On several occasions I have attempted to read James Joyce’s classic Ulysses, considered one of the greatest literary works of the 20th century. Each time I’ve tried, I have given up long before page 100.  It has been just too dense, leaving me drowning in its stream of consciousness. But, sometime before I die, I intend to successfully read Ulysses. Reading Dubliners is a stepping-stone toward that goal.

Dubliners, is a collection of 15 short stories written by Joyce early in his career.  They were first published in 1914.  Colum McCann, who wrote the Foreword to the centennial edition of the book, acknowledges the difficulty of Joyce’s writing.  He refers to Dubliners as the “laboratory” used to begin Joyce’s body of work.  Many of the character studies in the stories, he says, will appear again in Ulysses.  So, my plan is to begin, at the beginning.

The short story selection includes some literary scenes that remain recognizable over 100 years later. 

For Chicago readers the story Ivy Day in the Committee Room should be particularly familiar.  It covers get-out-the-vote conversations between election workers.  The “committee room” is what we would call the ward offices of Chicago’s still powerful Irish-dominated Democratic Machine, home to such names as Daley, Madigan, Cullerton and Hines – Irish clans that span generations and continue to control much (all?) that goes on in Chicago, Cook County, and Illinois.  They didn’t write the book on elections, but they definitely read it, offered edits, and added chapters.

Another story, Eveline, is short and powerful.  It tells of a young woman who has been swept off her feet by a fast-talking young man.  She is about to run away to Argentina with him when she considers everything that makes her so willing to do so; which in the end are the same things that hold her in Dublin.  It is followed immediately by After the Race, a revealing story about class.

The collection ends with what was my favorite, despite its name: The Dead.  The story takes place the day and night of an annual dinner party.  In very many ways it reminds me of Virginia Wolfe’s book Mrs. Dalloway, which was written a generation later.  As the dinner party is coming to a close, one of the guests begins to sing a song The Lass of Aughrim that reminds a married woman of her first real love in life – someone who died before she ever met her husband. 

Next up on my James Joyce list:  The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

The Fire of His Genius (2001) By Kirkpatrick Sale

This’ truly the season (presidential election season) to scrap the standard way of telling history. Let's forget Washington, Jefferson, King David, Napoleon, Justinian, Caesar, Laozi, Voltaire, and the Greats: Alexander, Catherine and Peter.  People are tiresome, and they die.  Maybe we should give primacy in history to inventions:  the wheel, the abacus, the computer, flight, vaccines, and the steamboat.  Okay, maybe we keep the multi-dimensional Ben Franklin and his kite.

This re-ordering of history telling seems to be the plot of Kirkpatrick Sales’ biography of Robert Fulton The Fire of His Genius.  And, he has a point.  Fulton, the namesake of numerous locales in the United States (including Fulton, Kentucky, a.k.a. “the banana capital of the world,” the cause of my review of Peter Chapman’s Bananas), is all but forgotten to modern times.  Yet, he perfected the all but forgotten but exceedingly historically significant steamboat, and proved it could be a commercial success.

Let’s see, without the steamboat:  no Manifest Destiny, no Hudson River Line, no upstream Mississippi River traffic, no Show Boat nor Old Man River; and alas, no backdrop for Huckleberry Finn or Tom Sawyer.  And to jump industries, without his financial success running a steamboat line, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt would have never had the capital necessary to give us the New York Central Rail Road, or the Biltmore for that matter.

As is often the case with a genius, focus was always a problem for Fulton.  His work on steamboats more times than not was delayed, much to the irritation of his business partner, by Fulton’s dalliance with naval warfare.  He was fascinated with and did much of the earlier engineering work on submarines, torpedoes and water mines – all three of which would make their mark, for better or worse, on world history (and this interest was strictly as an engineer, not as a patriot, he serially and sometimes simultaneously tried to sell these ideas to the French, British, and American governments while they warred with each other).

Oh, and then there is Fulton’s personal life (1765 – 1815), which would raise a few eyebrows even today.

Sales’ book is interesting, his research is exhaustive – his writing is dull.  Yet, The Fire of His Genius is still a worthy read, helping to connect the historical dots of many of those dead people.