Heart of Darkness: Over the years
I received a text message from a friend last week who had just finished Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The one thing that intrigued him, in this accomplished work, was this line somewhere at the end of the book – “since then, I have felt rather like Kurtz waiting for my Marlowe.” What did that refer to, was the question in the message.
And I was reminded of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its continuing relevance over a century since it was first published. Mohsin Hamid cleverly brings up the reference at the end to round up his view of the bearded narrator, once among the best and the brightest at Princeton, who has turned renegade and his rendezvous at a Lahore café with a possible undercover American assassin out there to settle scores.
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (often featuring at the top of the heap of the greatest books …
