I read this a long time ago, and then again this weekend, and realised that I remembered maybe 5% of it. It's perhaps not that surprising because the existential meandering dominates the actual events, and many of the those events involve lying around being too hot, too sweaty, and too sick, just waiting. That's unfair - events do unfold, characters are met, unpleasantness witnessed, at at the creshendo, blood is spilled. The pace, however, is slow. Nineteenth century slow. Dickens sprints by comparison. Each moment of emotion and contemplation is picked apart, over-written, beaten into submission with $100 words. 
 Two things save this from being discarded within pages and perhaps (along with academia's love affair and inclusion on ten thousand secondary school English curricula) explain its longevity. Firstly, if you forgive the overblown language that is perhaps a sign of his times more than anything, Conrad has a rare eye for characterisation and description. He 'sees' and manages to share, delivering, when he chooses to, whole people with a handful of lines. Secondly, the heart of the heart... of darkness is a mystery that obsesses the narrator and starts to compel the reader. Like our narrator steaming his way upriver into the unknown, we want to meet Kurtz, to find out what it is about this man that's so extraordinary. 
 In the end, like anything that is built up and built up again, Kurtz is a let down, but somehow Conrad saves it with the man's last words. Another mystery left for the reader and one that's kept people reading the work for a hundred years. 
 3.5 stars from me - I can appreciate its worth, but I wasn't enraptured. 
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