The other night while I was watching Jeopardy, a question about this turn-of-the-century novella came up. I decided to make it my next 100-page logging. Three days later, I am upset. Upset that this piece of shit is considered a classic, and a symbolic one at that. This book sucked! I'm sorry, but that's my opinion of it. The whole thing was incredibly boring and its brevity did nothing to assuage my frustration. The story was actually a story within a story, creating an annoying effect where every single paragraph began with quotation marks as a man named Marlow narrated the whole thing to a group of sailors on a boat. Why include the sailors and the boat? Why not just get rid of all the open quotation marks and have Marlow narrate the story from the get go? Apparently because the sky darkening as Marlow told his tale was beautifully symbolic. I guess I never would have understood the blatant moral undertones of the story without such obvious visuals. Yeah, I get it. People are evil. Hearts are dark. Maybe I zoned out and missed something pivotal (or several things pivotal) but as the "plot" unfolded I only became more and more amazed at how little was going on. The famous line you've probably heard that this novella spawned was, "The horror! The horror!" Horror indeed. I'm fed up with all of these bullshit books from 100 years ago that are praised to this day for being timeless and significant. I guarantee you, if someone tried to publish this today, no one would even let him. "What's the point?" they'd ask. "Where's the story?" Do yourself a favor and ignore this piece of shit. The only thing about it I could consider "timeless" would how much less time I needed to spend on it.
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