Appearance
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Collected Works of Joseph Conrad)
got a sour taste for conrad during college because of a teacher who was fixated on symbolism, and couldn't enjoy conrad's stories without over anal-izing them. i've been re-reading some lately and find them more enjoyable now.
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Collected Works of Joseph Conrad)
Joseph Conrad's 1904 novel NOSTROMO is set in Costaguana, a fictional South American country (though clearly based on Colombia and Panama) that has seen continuous waves of dictatorships and popular uprisings, reducing it to a poor backwater. But things are looking up for its western province where Charles Gould, native-born but of English ancestry, opens a silver mine with the backing of an American magnate and a British railroad company. Conrad's interest is the tension between the European residents of Sulaco, who think that their financial interests are bringing stability and prosperity to a dysfunctional state, and the Costaguanan peasants who think that foreigners are plundering their land. After reading NOSTROMO, I'm pretty confident now that Conrad was a colonialist and a racist, as some critics have long charged, but I think he was a nuanced one.Initially, we get only allusions to Nostromo, an Italian immigrant who distinguishes himself as the leader of the port's longshoremen and by his readiness to undertake difficult tasks for the Europeans. Everyone calls him the "indispensable man" and he becomes a Costaguanan national myth, but he remains an enigma for much of the novel. Eventually Nostromo's story, his thirst for recognition and wealth, takes over and and relegates the political drama to the background.Unfortunately, I found NOSTROMO tedious. Conrad called this 400-page depiction of a whole society his "largest canvas", and he gets so involved in world-building that there's no dramatic push. Only about halfway through do we start to see a glimmer of a plot. If your only previous experience with Conrad (as I think is the case with many potential readers) is HEART OF DARKNESS, where the action flows as steadily as the Congo River that is the work's setting, then you may well be frustrated by the slow pace of this novel. Also, Conrad's peculiar English (he didn't speak the language regularly until the age of 20) is intriguing at shorter spans but here just contributes to the burdensome nature of getting through this book. I appreciate a number of elements of Conrad's art, but I find it hard to recommend this.I read the Wordsworth Classics edition of this book. It features a decent introduction and footnotes by scholar Robert Hampson, as well as a glossary of the foreign-language terms sprinkled throughout the text. Unfortunately, the quality of Wordsworth Classics publications leaves much to be desired and after a single reading the binding and paper were beginning to fall apart.
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Collected Works of Joseph Conrad)
I gave up on this book the first time I tried it and am doing better this time.It feels like a very contempoary story as it charts the progress of a silver mine in a Central American corrupt republic which envies the English owners but dare not kill the goose that lays the golden (silver ?) eggs.A story of our time.
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Collected Works of Joseph Conrad)
The book was wonderful - couldn't put it down. Joseph Conrad just grabs a person and doesn't let go. His descriptionsof the people are wonderful, especially Nostromo himself.
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Collected Works of Joseph Conrad)
Though more complex, detailed, and ambitious, Nostromo doesn't quite have the effect of Heart of Darkness. Nonetheless, it is the work of a master and well worth cherishing.
Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Collected Works of Joseph Conrad)
Was not an easy read for me for many reasons and I really had to take time to understand the storyline, the political premises, and multiple characters and their representations of political purposes. This is a challenging read, definitely requiring commitment, and I struggled at times not because it was not interesting but because it was not a natural pick for my taste. Nevertheless, it is of high literary quality-- complex, interesting, definitely with the distinct voice and style of this author.