Heart of Darkness
Conrad's account of imperial horror in the Congo, told through layers of narrative that implicate the reader in Kurtz's darkness. Achebe famously attacked it as racist in 1977; the ensuing debate is itself now canonical. The ambiguity is irreducible. At under 100 pages, it is the most debated short novel in English.
The Africans in this book do not speak. They are called savages, given no names and no dialogue, and exist only through the European gaze recording them, a charge Achebe put on the record in 1975: "Conrad was a thoroughgoing racist." The prose does its defense no favors, "full of those four-dollar words" and "jumping from one topic to the next constantly," with readers reaching for Oxford footnotes to track the allusions. Marlow keeps announcing that some stretch is too meaningless to relate, then relates it for pages. Kurtz gets built up across the entire book and delivers a handful of lines. "Conrad really can write beautiful sentences, thus the 2," one reader concludes.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
