Books I am Reading
Like a lot of busy people I know, I try to read several books at once. Believe it or not, I am re-reading Conrad's "Heart of Darkness". Marlow keeps transforming each time I read the book, but that's not why I am reading it. I am reading the book with particular attention to craft, and yes, reading this way shows me how Conrad was putting the story together, and the effect he was trying to get from the words he chose, the phrases he crafted. This edition has footnotes that show the tranformation of the text from when it first appeared in a magazine to when it was published in England as a book, to the first authoritative American edition. Certain offensive or insensitive passages were removed, either by Conrad himself or by editors. When describing Kurtz's African girlfriend, Conrad, or is it Marlow, had been indulgent, the ambivalence of the language choice rising rapidly with the accumulation of prose (to praise or not to pra...
