Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's novella first serialised in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899, is told aloud at dusk by a seaman named Marlow, on a boat anchored in the Thames. He recounts taking a river steamer into Africa for a European trading company, in search of Kurtz, a celebrated ivory agent rumoured to be ill. Conrad had gone up the Congo himself in 1890. Its Africans are nameless and almost wordless, a racism that remains on the page beside the book's disgust at colonial greed.
Plan on slow work. There are only three parts, of about 24,000, 18,500 and 18,500 syllables, nearly all in Marlow's voice with other speakers nested inside it. The fog and attack in Part II move faster, and the last scene with Kurtz's fiancée, in short spoken lines, is easiest. Listen for titles: a devoted Russian calls Kurtz ngài ấy where Marlow says ông ấy. The English you tap keeps Conrad's racial slur; the Vietnamese usually has gã da đen.
