Joseph Conrad - Coração das Trevas | Heart of Darkness (ed. bilingue)

Heart of Darkness is a novel written by the Anglo-Polish writer Joseph Conrad. Before its publication in 1902, it appeared as a three-part serial in the Blackwood Edinburgh Magazine between February and April 1899. It is widely considered by international critics to be one of the one hundred most important works of 20th-century world literature and part of the Western canon.

The story follows Charles Marlow, an English adventurer who obtains a position with a Belgian trading company as captain of a river steamboat in the African colonies, transporting ivory from the interior to export ports. However, his most urgent task is to discover the whereabouts of Mr. Kurtz, one of the most famous administrators of the colony's trading posts, whose fate is unknown to everyone.

Conrad constructed a symbolic narrative with a story within a story, or a framing narrative: Marlow recounts his adventures to a group of friends aboard a ship anchored in the Thames estuary, from dusk till dawn the following day. The passage of time and the darkened sky of a sunset over London frame the dense and heavy atmosphere of this story within a story. Conrad's narrative is extremely clear and reveals in few words the deepest and cruelest relationship between colonizers and colonized reflected within the intricacies of the African jungle, as the reader delves into the psyche of its characters.