Conrad

My father loved Joseph Conrad novels; I have always found them difficult. In my mind always is the idea that Conrad wasn't English but Polish, a Pole who had learned English, so I had the idea that here was a man who thought in Polish and translated it into English in his head before writing it down. Probably not true but this idea satisfied me that that was the reason I found him difficult - not my fault but his.
Then I read a short novel called, if I remember right, "Typhoon" and my feeling towards him changed: here was a great writer whose powers of description were matched and enhanced by great literary style.
Yet "Heart of Darkness" I still find difficult. The "framed narrative" makes it seem contrivedly difficult; Marlowe is not an easy character to like; Kurtz is too mythical a character to be believed when later he is met by Marlowe; a lot of the writing is so beautiful stylistically that I sometimes feel myself distracted from the story by my admiration of it.
I have just seen "Apocalypse Now", Francis Ford Coppolla's film which is, of course, a modernish version of "Heart of Darkness" and I feel impelled to re-read the novel. But I found the film too quite difficult to understand and, at times, to bear. It is very very slow; I felt that violent occurances were there sometimes to give the slow up-river journey some dramatic qualities; I thought the end quite unbelieveable and the philosophising of Kurtz a bit on the cracker-barrel side.
Yet it left me with an overall feeling of admiration, a feeling that there was in this film and the book more than met the eye; that there was in it a depth that I had not penetrated; and it makes me wish to discover some of the truths underlying this strange, fascinating work.
I shall re-read the book.