Heart of Darkness (version 2): Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Heart of Darkness (version 2), credited to Joseph Conrad, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Heart of Darkness (version 2), by Joseph Conrad. Read by Bob Neufeld. Heart of Darkness is a novella written by Joseph Conrad. Before its 1903 publication, it appeared as a three-part series (1899) in Blackwood's Magazine. It was classified by the Modern Library website editors as one of the "100 best novels" and part of the Western canon. The story centres on Charles Marlow, who narrates most of the book. He is an Englishman who takes a foreign assignment from a Belgian trading company as a river-boat captain in Africa. Heart of Darkness exposes the dark side of European colonization while exploring the three levels of darkness that the protagonist, Marlow, encounters: the darkness of the Congo wilderness, the darkness of the Europeans' cruel treatment of the African natives, and the unfathomable darkness within every human being for committing heinous acts of evil. Although Conrad does not give the name of the river, at the time of writing the Congo Free State, the location of the large and important Congo River, was a private colony of Belgium's King Leopold II. In the story, Marlow is employed to transport ivory downriver. However, his more pressing assignment is to return Kurtz, another ivory trader, to civilization, in a cover-up. Kurtz has a reputation throughout the region. (Summary by Wikipedia)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Heart of Darkness (version 2)
• Author credits: Joseph Conrad
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 6
• Listed recording duration: 4:38:45

Catalogue topics

• adventure
• fiction

Track guide

1. 01 - Chapter 1 - Part 1 — 52:18
2. 02 - Chapter 1 - Part 2 — 48:58
3. 03 - Chapter 2 - Part 1 — 47:15
4. 04 - Chapter 2 - Part 2 — 40:29
5. 05 - Chapter 3 - Part 1 — 46:56
6. 06 - Chapter 3 - Part 2 — 42:54

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.