| Title | : | Nostromo |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0486424529 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780486424521 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 336 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1904 |
Nostromo Reviews
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Joseph Conrad, who knew the human nature inside out, telling the story of Nostromo and portraying his personages is ironic and even slightly derisive…
Every man, somewhere deep inside, has his own share of rascality… And every human doing has two sides…Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.
The events take place in the South American country of Costaguana, which is being torn with greed, political ambitions, poverty and revolutions…They had stopped near the cage. The parrot, catching the sound of a word belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to interfere. Parrots are very human.
“Viva Costaguana!” he shrieked, with intense self-assertion, and, instantly ruffling up his feathers, assumed an air of puffed-up somnolence behind the glittering wires.
There always are pushers and those who are pushed…In all these households she could hear stories of political outrage; friends, relatives, ruined, imprisoned, killed in the battles of senseless civil wars, barbarously executed in ferocious proscriptions, as though the government of the country had been a struggle of lust between bands of absurd devils let loose upon the land with sabres and uniforms and grandiloquent phrases. And on all the lips she found a weary desire for peace, the dread of officialdom with its nightmarish parody of administration without law, without security, and without justice.
One day the pushed ones grow tired of being cat’s paws and rebel… Some outwardly, some inwardly… But anyway, in the end they turn out to be the ones who pay for their rebellion. -
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad is a true classic, one of the greatest English language novels ever written.
Not far into the tale, I came across these lines about a silver mine owned by one Charles Gould, a proper Englishman by ancestry and disposition, a gent who lives with his wife in a mansion inherited from his father located in Conrad's fictional country of Costaguana in the northwest quadrant of South America, a country sharing much geography with real-life Colombia:
"Mrs Gould knew the history of the San Tomé mine. Worked in the early days mostly by means of lashes on the backs of slaves, its yield had been paid for in its own weight of human bones. Whole tribes of Indians had perished in the exploitation; and then the mine was abandoned, since with the primitive method it had ceased to make a profitable return, no matter how many corpses were thrown into its maw."
Vintage Joseph Conrad: powerful language, powerful images, powerful statement on culture and society.
Here's a quote from author/critic Eduardo Galeano: "If the material bases of a country belong to foreigners and its society is organized along concentration-camp lines, what national culture can flourish and breathe freely, shared by all?"
I have the Wordsworth Classics edition with a scholarly introduction by Robert Hamson. The professor emphasizes Nostromo is one of the few novels written in English during the early 20th century "that adequately registers the dynamics of a society; one of the earliest English novels to engage with the rhetoric and practices of American imperialism that have come to dominate the twentieth century; and one of the few English novels that deals, with any sophistication, with the world of multi-national corporate enterprise that we all inhabit."
Later in his essay, Prof. Hamson goes on to say, "The silver of the mine is the novel's symbol for 'material interests' - the Dickensian phrase that Conrad uses for what we now call 'market forces'. Conrad explores their operation in relation to imperialism: 'material interests' represent not the obvious extermination of local people and exploitation of local resources that characterized the first wave of South American colonization, but the more subtle exploitation of people and resources through North American and European penetration and domination of the economy."
So, based on "the more subtle exploitation of people" coupled with the frequent characterization of all colors and races of the indigenous population as barbarous, it appears I have the answer to the question Eduardo Galeano poses as it relates to native cultures in the novel - none! The natives are there only to provide the needed hard labor until they drop dead.
I highlight the cultural and economic conditions underpinning the tale's unfolding drama to underscore any high adventure, any gain in prestige and wealth enjoyed by Charles Gould, Nostromo and others in the novel will be achieved on the dark copper backs of a dying native population.
If only Costaguana shared the same air and atmosphere as the island in Michal Ajvaz's novel, The Golden Age: upon landing, preparing to launch their attack, each wave of Conquistadors immediately undergo a complete softening of the brain: their mindset replicates the islanders - thoughts of conquest vanish, replaced by a desire to do nothing more than listen to the hidden music of wind and water from dawn to dusk, to luxuriate in warm feelings of the present moment.
Nope, no Michal Ajvaz supernatural elements in Joseph Conrad's ferociously realistic novel. But the great Polish author does pepper his adventure yarn with humor. For example, strolling a corridor in their mansion, Charles Gould speaks to his dear wife, refined, cultured, English-born Doña Emilia, about their amassing stupendous wealth and his command of Costaguana, both thanks to the reopening of his silver mine:
"They had stopped near the cage. The parrot, catching the sounds of a word belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to interfere. Parrots are very human.
"Viva Costaguana!" he shrieked, with intense self-assertion, and, instantly ruffling up his feathers, assumed an air of puffed-up somnolence behind the glittering wires."
Sounds like Charles Gould's Costaguana parrot could be the ancestor of the parrot mentioned in Juan Gabriel Vásquez's The Sound of Things Falling, a famous parrot kept in Pablo Escobar's zoo that could recite the entire lineup of the Colombian national soccer team.
Back on material interests driving action in Nostromo. Here's an excerpt from an exchange between Charles Gould and Holroyd, an American baron of industry reminding one of John D. Rockefeller or J. P. Morgan. Holroyd agrees to provide vast sums of money needed to reopen Gould's silver mine. Holroyd speaks with pride of his country, the United States: "Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God's Universe. We shall be giving the word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith's Sound, and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world's business whether the world likes it or not."
Keep in mind Joseph Conrad wrote these words in 1904, as if his could see with crystalline sight and insight into the future, even the distant future stretching all the way to our present day. Astonishing.
As reviewer, I'm well to stress economic and social context but I also need to emphasize Joseph Conrad writes Nostromo at the height of his literary powers and creates a vivid Costaguana filled with memorable, fully-developed characters. An entire essay could be composed on at least a dozen of their number but I'll conclude with a brief portrayal of three:
Antonia Avellanos
Twenty-six year old daughter of one of the most prominent families in Costaguana, Antonia is a highly educated, poised, polished lady, the envy of all the woman who have had the opportunity to set eyes on her. And what man could gaze on her ravishing beauty without falling deeply in love with Antonia?
Martin Decoud
Refined intellectual and journalist, Decoud is native to Costaguana but received his education in Paris. "Martin Decoud, the dilettante in life, imagined himself to derive an artistic pleasure from watching the picturesque extreme of wrongheadedness into which an honest, almost sacred, conviction may drive a man. 'It is like madness. It must be because it's self-destructive,' Decoud had said to himself often. It seemed to him that every conviction, as soon as it became effective, turned into that form of dementia the gods send upon those they wish to destroy. But he enjoyed the bitter flavour of that example with the zest of a connoisseur in the art of his choice."
Now why would a man like Decord return from Paris and remain in the hinterland of Costaguana, a land he scorns? Answer: he's fallen madly in love with Antonia.
Giovanni Battista Fidanza aka Nostromo
"This Nostromo, sir, a man absolutely above reproach, became the terror of all the thieves in the town." So proclaims Captain Mitchell, influential representative of the shipping company for Costaguana. And this from Martin Decoud, "You have seen him pass by after his labours on his famous horse to dazzle the girls in some ballroom with an earthen floor. He is a fortunate fellow! His work is an exercise of personal powers; his leisure is spent in receiving the marks of extraordinary adulation. And he likes it too. Can anybody be more fortunate? To be feared and admired."
As readers, we have an opportunity to behold Nostromo exercising his extraordinary, dazzling powers when he's charged with transporting silver on a large sailboat at night and encounters multiple dangers. To echo Captain Mitchell, "A man in a thousand!"
If you were to read only one English language classic in your lifetime, you could do no better than Joseph Conrad's Nostromo.
Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924 -
Nostromo, Joseph Conrad’s South American novel reminds me somehow of Ayn Rand’s
Atlas Shrugged, perhaps the setting of mines in South America.
The underlying political ideologies are also reminiscent to some extent on Rand’s objectivism, and both author’s guileless mistrust of democracy ambles towards, but never wholly approaches, a Nietzschean ideal. In this aspect, Nostromo “the incorruptible” can be compared and contrasted with Kurtz, Conrad's archetypal villain from
Heart of Darkness. Whereas Kurtz was a tragic, fallen figure, Nostromo can be seen as perhaps Conrad’s vision of an ideal (though also a tragic hero).
This philosophy can be glimpsed obliquely in Rand’s flawed masterpiece and can be read serenely and politely in Conrad’s noble prose. Perhaps Rand complimented Conrad in her own romantic realism with vague but discernable allusions to Conrad’s earlier work. Nostromo is also reminiscent of Hemingway’s
For Whom the Bell Tolls with its glaringly simple, straightforward and blunt depiction of revolution and of the ugliness that follows along with it; yet Conrad describes the revolution indirectly, almost as an off stage action in a play, and looks back on the time abstractly, and with not some little sympathy.
Finally, Nostromo is also representative of Conrad’s brilliant use of time and transition, piecing the tale together almost surreptitiously, eluding the reader with casual dismissals of a chronological timeline and varying scope and perspective.
One of his best.
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Between 1902 and the year of its publication (1904), Joseph Conrad was caught in an abyss of depression, financial collapse and severe gout, but somehow still managed to write what is a deep, adventurous and dark novel. A Tale of the Seaboard, was originally planned as a short-story but was to become his longest work, with the composition it would lead him to say "I see nothing, I read nothing. It is like a kind of tomb which is also hell where one must write, write, write.". Nostromo was received poorly back in the day, a product not so much of its characters or their complexities, but of the plotting. It's no doubt a well oiled machine, but I can see why for some, those who like nice flowing stories that are easy on the eye, it's all too much. I can say it took up to a hundred pages too finally grasp hold of its dense narrative, but after that I was starting to see a masterpiece develop before my eyes.
Set in the fictional Latin American country of Costaguana, and a silver mine, the novel has so much going on, but simply put is based around one thing - a crisis. A crisis by which the province passes from the troubles of post-colonial misrule to the unquiet prosperity of Anglo-American imperial capitalism. Two key men are important to the story, Nostromo himself, the trusted boss of European laborers, and Martin Decoud, a shady journalist working for an even more shady government, who's aim is to smuggle a last shipment of silver out of the Occidental Province and thus ensure continued American financial backing. Of course this failed, leading to almost total chaos.
The country simmers in the sweltering heat, with labour troubles, Catholic priests going to war with American Protestant evangelists, factions clamouring for the invasion of Costaguana, and the majority of characters either killed off, or left physically and mentally damaged.
Decoud and Nostromo, like the book itself, are engaged through the first half of their stories in discovering the flaws and corruption of their society, and there is certainly a lot of that!. I could never take sides, and didn't trust anyone, and this here is one the great strengths of the novel - the unpredictable actions of it's main characters. Most of what goes on is, to put it bluntly, ruthless. And I'm not one of those who has to fall in love with a novel's characters to love the novel.
Politically, this is a serious work, and just goes to show what can happen when the people you think are in charge, are just as much the scoundrels as the scoundrels themselves. And yet the novel somehow presents that actions are taken admirably, and with morel. I can understand the determination of each and every character, and consequences that sometimes play out with them. Through backstory, historical facts on the region, flashbacks and anachrony, Conrad's stylistic innovation gives the reader plenty, and I mean plenty, to chew on. Like I said, its dense.
His lavish storytelling on civilization and social conventions is so well done, it has me thinking of him wondering around south America with map and compass looking for some inspiration.
And that's why in the end Nostromo works so well. As somewhere in there is an adventure story, just without any real heroes.
Nostromo on the whole may be a difficult, unconventional novel, but for me it's a masterpiece. In anyone else's hands it wouldn't have worked. If F. Scott Fitzgerald really did say “I’d rather have written Conrad’s Nostromo than any other novel”, then I'm glad he didn't! Not because Scotty was a bad writer, far from it, but because this is a world far away from all that jazz, flamboyance and glamour. -
Nostromo is considered by many to be Conrad’s greatest novel. The ambiguous nature of good and evil, the importance of duty, common themes in all of Conrad’s novels, get an epic treatment in Nostromo (my Modern Library edition is 630 pages long). But for all of its length, the novel, after the first dense, foundation building 50 pages or so, reads quickly. Published in 1904, the book has the feel of a modern novel. It’s a book about revolutions, money, and character, told through different voices, different eyes.
The main character is of course Nostromo, though the reader may at first be a bit puzzled by this, since for well over half the book Nostromo, a sailor and dock foreman, exists on the periphery of the story, but always as the “indispensible man.” If anything, the main character is, initially, the San Tome silver mine, a storehouse of wealth in the imaginary South American country of “Costaguana.” Charles Gould is the owner of the mine. He has inherited it from his father, but the mine is both a political football and silver goose due to the country’s never ending revolutions. (So much so that Gould’s uncle was executed by the previous junta.) Gould has no intention of ever letting that happen again, so he takes a different approach, inviting outside investors (American, and others) to get the mine running again, with a backup plan that involves a lot of dynamite. With a new, liberal government in place, it looks like everyone is making money.
Not so, as one resentful general feels he isn’t getting his fair share. Yet another revolution occurs, and the province of Sulaco (the richest in the country) falls under siege. Fortunately Sulaco is protected by its geography, and what follows is a race against time, with several factions vying for control of the country – and the silver. The cast of characters Conrad uses to tell his story seems vast, but the individual treatment is never shallow. Oh, some (most?) of the characters are shallow, depressingly so. Generals, sailors, crazy priests, revolutionaries, nihilists, bandits, women of various natures, are all revealed in their damaged glory. Gould himself, not really good or evil, is a mechanical man, a total materialist, who, oddly, is married to a secular saint of sorts, Emilia. There were times I wondered about this odd match, but in the end I figured Charles represented the ultimate project for Emilia. The result is a sterile standoff.
And then there’s Nostromo, a confident guy who on surface would seem the perfect Conradian hero. He gets the job done, whatever it is, always. However, the problem in Nostromo’s case is that it is always linked to how he feels he is viewed by others – especially his employers. His reputation is paramount. When the social order collapses, he feels “betrayed” by it (or “them”). But much of this is self-serving. When, through an accident, fate pushes the silver into his lap, he makes the wrong choice, and that choice eats at him throughout the rest of the novel, compounding itself into multiple bad choices, with the final, fatal choice linked to love. Some have complained about the late love story in the novel. For me it fittingly closed the circle, and is as heartbreaking an ending as I’ve read in literature. It’s a sad story told by a master. -
no...there is no peace and no rest in the development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and it is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle (p423)
On the reread I feel that this unrelentingly bleak novel is the novel of the twentieth century, at least for a fair proportion of the population of the world, this could be the country of
Heart of Darkness once it had achieved 'independence' or it could be
One Hundred years of solitude but told with earnestness and without optimism. As a student in class, we were given a cartoon strip version of
animal farm, this differed in one way from the original - at the end instead of simply observing how the pigs and the men became indistinguishable - the animals rise up in revolt through the whole bunch out and restart the cycle with a different species promoted to the leadership of the free world..
The most striking feature of the text is that Conrad gets bored with a conventional linear narrative and chops it up in different ways. Events in the few few pages are revisited from a different perspective, towards the middle of the book and towards the end Conrad tells the political ending through flashback, the reader must infer some detail and make allowance for the peculiarities of the specific narrative voices in each case. An effect of this is to suggest that the detail is irrelevant, the big story about the country of Bird shit coast, so I loosely render Costaguana into English, is about international interests, structures and habits of power, ultimately avarice wins and while avarice is unlikely to take your confession with a cigarette drooping out of the corner of its mouth before you are dragged out and shot, it is violent and destructive enough in its own way, trumping here with ease the nineteenth century ideal of nationalism and patriotism with the simple logic that if you have enough money or more accurately access to international credit you can buy the most modern guns and make your own country -all you need do then is invent a new flag. There is a vision of the silver rich mine: She saw the San Tome mountain hanging over the campo, over the whole land, feared, hated, wealthy; more soulless than any tyrant, more pitiless and autocratic than the worst government; ready to crush innumerable lives in the expansion of its greatness (p.431). The archbishop advises his flock to think on eternal suffering, which in the context of the history of the Bird shit coast seems unnecessary advice - but he himself is infected with the same avarice in the form of desire for the restitution of the landed wealth of the church. One might wonder about politic,s but from early on we are shown that the political ideals that had half starved, near naked men fight and win armed with knives tied to sticks in the service of Garibaldi for a united Italy are out manoeuvred by Cavour, the only relief is that money can wash away the incipient proto-fascism of the admirers of Napoleon III too. Love also seems coloured by wealth, Nostromo's relationship with his designated wife demonstrated by gifting her the silver buttons off his jacket as something of sufficient value to her. Dr Monygham loves Mrs Gould, but his love is a kind of injury, felt as pain and a feeling he can only appreciate because of the experiences that have left him with PTSD.
The shadow of de Tocqueville's opinion that all new regimes are built out of the bricks of the preceding one hangs over the narrative, escape from patterns and socialisation into violence, coercion and extortion is not to be found here. one of the few positive seeming characters is a bandit leader (and later minister of war), perhaps Hobsbawn's idea of social banditry was drawn more from this and memories of Robin Hood than from more conventional historical research.
One thread in the fabric of the twentieth century has been to hold men like Charles Gould up as heroes, but for Conrad, he is an adventurer - a member of a foreign legion, essentially alien and uncaringly destructive for all his claim of having been born 'here' implies some kind of kinship with the other citizens.
In short this novel is like a great bird that loosened its bowls across ideals of the nineteenth century, the vigorous splatter of which reveals the pattern of the twentieth century perhaps for all of us, since the banks must make their five percent, and to borrow their money you must meet their conditions what ever your own values.
I wonder having finished what Conrad might have made of the prospects of independent Poland, on the strength of this novel, I suspect he'd have felt no excess of optimism. -
Wait a minute, is this what Joseph Conrad is? I thought maybe I'd read The Secret Agent at the wrong time, because I felt like I should like it but I sortof didn't. I tell people I liked Heart of Darkness, but there's this vague air of uneasiness that I can't quite put my finger on: I've read it three times but I don't really remember it. And here I am at Nostromo, which is about a revolution! And secret treasure! This is exciting! And here's the thing: it fucking isn't. Here's Joseph Conrad's deep, dark truth: he's boring.
It sneaks up on you because he writes about exciting things. A voyage into the heart of darkness to meet the mighty Colonel Kurtz. A secret agent. A man who goes around with explosives strapped to him and a deadman switch at all times. Revolutions. The plot summaries sound exciting. But you get to it and there are no scenes! It's just descriptions. It's a lot of talk. It's boring.
If it were more exciting, here's what it would be about: This guy Nostromo is a mythically brave Capataz de Cargadores, which is another thing that sounds more exciting than it is, it just means he's in charge of the guys who unload ships. He's entrusted with smuggling some of this rich white guy's treasure - a lighter full of silver - out of town when a revolution hits. It's a dangerous job. Things go awry.
This is a lighter. It's just a boat.
The treasure is your classic briefcase from Pulp Fiction. It's a test, right? It's temptation. Every man in the book is tested against the treasure. (Conrad's not interested in women.)
Dr. Monagham, who was tortured in his past by a different dictator,
Martin Decoud, an intellectual,
And Nostromo himself, for whom reputation means everything, and to whom complete trust has been given:
Again, this all sounds great. It sounds like a big walloping adventure tale. But in practice it's just a shitload of talking and not very much doing.
Also there's a bit at the end with a lighthouse that feels like a totally disconnected short story that Conrad just scotch-taped on.
Look, when there are scenes - like the riveting night-time flight of the lighter - they're incredibly good. Dark, too. I mean literally, Conrad might be the greatest writer ever of scenes that take place in darkness. You end up feeling like if Conrad could get his head out of his own ass, he'd be a good writer. But he can't do it. He can't just tell you the story; he has to go explaining it to you. So I'm going to stop denying it: it's not me, it's him. Joseph Conrad is a writer of boring books. -
" He was ruined in every way, but a man possessed of passion is not a bankrupt in life." J. Conrad, Nostromo
A splendid story of romanticism, adventure and vice. Conrad employs an intricate narrative structure, intertwining four character studies and differing points of view around Sulaco, an imagined South American country, a ticking bomb with a violent past. He perfectly contrasts these against the fabulous scenery of mist-hidden mountains and a silver mine.
The novel begins in the midst of things with frequent flashbacks and some glimpses forward, as information is gradually revealed.
It’s filled the with spirited characters, including, of course, the magnificent Nostromo, who is a natural born leader, valiant, virtuous and very handsome, ready and able for center stage in the revolution about to destroy Sulaco.
A master of suspense and designer extraordinaire of complex plots, Conrad thereby transforms an otherwise typical tale of romantic adventure into a quite serious study of human nature in adversity, with themes of capitalism and imperialism and revolution. -
This is a character study of Europeans remaking themselves in the New World, in this case the fictional South American country of Costaguana. As in other books by this master that I’ve enjoyed over the decades (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, The Secret Sharer), I enjoyed the collision of the characters’ sense of noble purpose and the reality of corruption and self-interest that forever infests human enterprise. On the plus side, we delve into the minds and struggles of a larger cast of characters than in Conrad’s more famous works. The flip side of that is a diffusion of focus and a long traverse getting to know them before significant events occur that converge their pathways and challenge them to change their ways or fall by the wayside. In other words, the tale can try your patience a bit waiting for people to get unstuck in their ways.
The modernist elements in the writing that impressed me for a book published in 1904 include hopping among the perspectives of several key characters, with some interludes with an omniscient narrator and some playing with linearity in the timeframe. Two important characters we mainly come to know as reflected indirectly from the mindset of other characters, mine owner Charles Gould and his captain of the company’s security forces, Nostromo, whom we are told was a former guerrilla fighter with Garibaldi’s revolt in Italy and a merchant marine foreman after that.
Gould is the inheritor of a silver mining concession from his wealthy British ancestors, who were more into the shipping business of their steamship fleet than the big challenges of mining. While the Spanish for three centuries made treasures from the mine through brutal employment of slave labor and coerced labor, Gould applies his engineering training to make a more efficient and humane operation. Thus, the people mostly love him, and the provincial government and local businesses appreciate the boon to the economy. For a long time, income from the concession keeps the line of dictators at the distant capitol relatively happy through payment on the development investment they forced on him and ongoing bribes. However, the prospect of a successful revolutionary coup brings such stability to an end. With the fear of rebel insurgents taking the town, the peasants react by rioting and assaults on the homes and businesses of the upper classes. The hopes for the town and company in Nostromo’s competence in their defense is founded on a past success by him in heroically warding off a mob attack on one of the company’s boats trying evacuate company employees.
Conrad gives us a window on these two characters from the residents of the town Sulaco, including the viewpoints of Gould’s charming wife Emilia, who is tough in her own way but sincere in her charity; the cynical English doctor Monygham, whose torture by an earlier dictator leaves him wishing for a republic; the mine manager Joseph Mitchell, a fussy but efficient Brit promoted from a long tour as steamship captain; the progressive journalist Martin Decoud, who acquired European culture from his education in France; the virtuous local aristocrat Don Jose Avellanos and his wife Antonia; and Giorgio Viola, a merchant who also fought with Garibaldi and father of two daughters who come to captivate Nostromo. We come to wonder how noble Gould and Nostromo really are. The disparity between the luxury Gould lives in and the impoverished status of the town’s majority is obvious. In the case of Nostomo, some of his comments suggest a chafing in his soul from resentment of being exploited without suitable reward. Is the whole enterprise of extracting riches from this land doomed to the forces of corruption and excesses inherent with all colonial endeavors? All in Conrad’s cast of characters are forced to decide whether they should support capitulation to the new warlords or instead gamble on desperate resistance and a chance of making an independent republic out of their province. Regardless of who ends up in power, there is the thorny problem of keeping the large quantity of silver ingots not yet shipped out to buyers from being snatched by individuals from either side with their own greed in mind.
Conrad sold this story in serial form for a magazine. To satisfy such readers, he pulls off some great surprises for the ending. Along the way, his well-developed characters each undergo significant development to make the necessary choices to adapt and survive the treacherous events of the tale. Some rise to the occasion to make a moral stance, some get their just deserts, some get undeserved rewards, and some tragically pay with their lives. I admire the book, but overall my personal pleasure meter didn’t often reach high on the dial due to so many diversions among the characters. I was most moved when the prose suddenly lept off the page with some eloquent description of geography or insight into reality by his characters. Here is a small sample of his marvelous crafting of the English language despite growing up in Poland:
Don Jose Avellanos depended very much upon the devotion of his beloved Antonia. He accepted it in the benighted way of men, who, though made in God's image, are like stone idols without sense before the smoke of certain burnt offerings.”
Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.”
There is never any God in a country where men will not help themselves. -
An almost perfect Novel. I can't think of but a handful of writers (Dostoevsky, Kafka, Melville) who have written a better book.
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Nostromo was a difficult read for me. I started this book many years ago and gave up after the first 50 pages. This time I plowed through, and I'm glad I did. There's a lot of depth to this novel, but you don't see it until about halfway in.
The story takes place in a fictional South American country called Costaguana at the turn of the 20th century. An Englishman named Charles Gould has inherited a ruined mining concession, and undertakes to restore it, mostly as a means of sticking a thumb in the eye of the corrupt Costaguana government that caused the ruin of the mine, and the ruin of Gould's father. The title character, Nostromo, is an Italian sailor named Gian' Battista Fidanza, who works as the cargo manager at the port of Sulaco, the city where the action takes place. He is a man of nearly superhuman ability and moral courage, seen as indispensable by the European owners and managers in Sulaco. Despite his great value, his financial rewards are few.
The Gould mining concession is an irresistible prize for the Costaguana government. A few generals stage a military coup, claiming to be democrats and men of the people, with the aim of seizing the mine's wealth. Charles Gould will have none of it, and would rather destroy the mine than have it fall into the hands of the brigands who are coming to seize it.
So at one level the novel addresses issues of colonialism, and in a way that I'm not too happy about. The locals are characterized as thieves, lazy, indigent, greasy, unkempt, venal, crude, and so on, while the Europeans are, for the most part, depicted as idealistic, selfless, beleaguered, and enlightened. But, as always with Conrad, the picture is not quite so cut and dried. Nostromo, and his would-be adopted father Giorgio Viola, an ex captain in the army of Garibaldi, a dedicated republican (in the old sense meaning in favor of liberty), see the Europeans as the exploiters that they are - of course, they themselves are European, but have a moral and philosophical bias towards the downtrodden. And the Europeans themselves are shown to be obsessed by their need to extract the maximum wealth from the country, while treating the local people as mere means towards that end.
The real interest of the novel is in its psychological portraits of the principal characters. Conrad is comfortable with complexity of character, and his characters are never paper cutouts - each one of the major characters in this novel have conflicting desires, and the novel is in some ways a working out of those internal conflicts. Actually there is one exception to this: Captain Mitchell, the local agent for the main shipping company in Sulaco, is a completely self unaware person, who fancies himself a person of deep perception and great courage, but possessing neither. He serves as a kind of quasi-comic foil to the real players: Nostromo, Charles Gould and his wife Emily, Martin Decoud, Giorgio Viola and his wife and daughters, and Dr. Monygham.
This is a novel very well worth reading. Conrad stands out amongst authors of his era for the way that he embraces psychological and social ambiguity. He was a modern writer in that sense, and a realist. -
Greed stripped to the bone - at least you can eat bananas in such a republic - but tin pots with nothing to cook in them; funny thing is Che finds lots of 'Costaguanas' in his The Mortorcycle Diaries - ah well - truth is stranger than fiction - so 'they' say when it is pointed out.
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Nostromo begins with a legend. The story goes, among some of the people of Conrad’s republic of Costaguana, that two wandering sailors- “Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for certain”- persuade a local man to take them out across the Gulfo Placido to a desolate, inhospitable peninsula, where the locals believe there is gold. “The poor, associating by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth”, believe the peninsula to be cursed. On the second evening after the sailors’ departure, a spiral of smoke can be seen from the mainland; they’re never heard from or seen again. But “…the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls cannot tear themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over the discovered treasure.”
The first thing that drew me into this book was the language. I think Heart of Darkness is great, and I liked Lord Jim well enough, but that was all I knew of Conrad; I had never known he could write like this. Nostromo is a demanding book; I often had to read a sentence two or three times, trying to locate the precise word or phrase (sometimes a strangely-used preposition, sometimes a Spanish word, sometimes a description of something in the physical world that I couldn’t picture) that tripped me up. I couldn’t read it after having drunk more than a single beer, and I doubt you could read it with an iPhone in your pocket. It requires some work, but the book reminds you that you don’t want to shortchange yourself by glancing at a screen every other minute; you want to appreciate the language in its complexity.
Heart of Darkness is compact, with seemingly nothing extraneous; the same cannot be said of Nostromo. I’m not sure I’ve ever read a novel structured this way. Throughout most of the first 200 pages or so we seem to be drifting somewhere in time and language; the story seems to progress more by free association than by chronological order of events. A person or place will be mentioned tangentially and obliquely towards the middle or end of a paragraph- ‘the director of companies’, for example- and then the next paragraph, as if mentioning the director has just reminded the narrator that he wants to tell us more about him, begins with a description of the director. Descriptions of characters- their sharp, vivid faces and personalities- seem to emerge from a fog of language for a paragraph or two, then disappear again. The frame through which we see things can expand or contract very suddenly: from a description of the waters and the islands off the coast of the country, we may quickly find ourselves listening to two characters speaking about something seemingly unrelated (in one case through the eyes of the characters' parrot), without feeling that any abrupt or unnatural transition has taken place. Occasionally we drop in on characters, somewhere in time, who may be referred to by their names, or just ‘the director‘ or ‘the doctor’- this has the effect of making the characters, at first, seem remote, but the remoteness somehow gives them depth and power.
There are countless minor characters portrayed just as vividly. For example, the ludicrous deposed dictator Guzman Bento:
Guzman Bento, usually full of fanciful fears and brooding suspicions, had sudden accesses of unreasonable self-confidence when he perceived himself elevated on a pinnacle of power and safety beyond the reach of mere mortal plotters. At such times he would impulsively command the celebration of a solemn Mass of thanksgiving which would be sung in great pomp in the cathedral of Sta Marta by the trembling, subservient Archbishop of his creation. He heard it sitting in a gilt armchair placed before the high altar, surrounded by the civil and military heads of his Government. The unofficial world of Sta Marta would crowd into the cathedral, for it was not quite safe for anybody of mark to stay away from these manifestations of presidential piety. Having thus acknowledged the only power he was at all disposed to recognize as above himself, he would scatter acts of political grace in a sardonic wantonness of clemency. There was no other way left now to enjoy his power but by seeing his crushed adversaries crawl impotently into the light of day out of the dark, noisome cells of the Collegio. Their harmlessness fed his insatiable vanity, and they could always be got hold of again. It was the rule for all the women of their families to present thanks afterwards in a special audience. The incarnation of that strange god, El Gobierno Supremo, received them standing, cocked hat on head, and exhorted them in a menacing mutter to show their gratitude by bringing up their children in fidelity to the democratic form of government, ‘which I have established for the happiness of our country.’ His front teeth having been knocked out in some accident of his former herdsman’s life, his utterance was spluttering and indistinct. He had been working for Costaguana alone in the midst of treachery and opposition. Let it cease now lest he should become weary of forgiving!
Nostromo reminds me of something Camus wrote in The Rebel, I think about de Sade (although my copy of the book was lost in a flood, and I unfortunately can’t look it up), to the effect of, “no character is the author who created him. But it may be that an author is all of his characters simultaneously.” I don’t know a great deal about Conrad’s life, but I got the sense that he was Nostromo; Decoud, who dreams of creating a new republic, but who, according to Father Corbelan, “believes in neither stick nor stone; not the son of his own country, nor of any other”; Charles Gould, in thrall, like the gringos in the legend, to the silver of his mine; traumatized Dr. Monygham, thought of by the people he treats as evil; and maybe Father Corbelan as well, whose appearance “suggested something unlawful about his priesthood, the idea of a chaplain of bandits.”
I often find myself, when reading books, thinking in the clichés that I’ve absorbed from blurbs and bad reviews; so I was set to write that Conrad’s view of life and politics is ‘surprisingly modern’, without really thinking about it, ‘modern’ being in most reviews and blurbs a synonym for ‘correct.’ But it seems to me, anecdotally anyway, that modern people tend to feel that the world is moving slowly but steadily towards an ideal of justice, and that technology is a driving force in that. I think that Conrad, if he were alive, would disagree; he at least did not believe that in his own time. The reader is never really given enough information to decide, for example, whether Montero would make a better president than Ribiera, or if Ribiera was even any better than Guzman Bento. In Conrad’s view, it doesn’t really matter. And yes, he’s writing very specifically here about Latin America; but there’s a part in Heart of Darkness where Marlow talks about civilization as a flicker of light. We live in the flicker, Marlow says. This idea gains its full expression in Nostromo: the people rise up against a dictator, perhaps defeat him, but eventually become corrupted themselves. Conrad believes (I think) that history is not a progression towards justice, but cyclical. It's cyclical because people are people, and don't really change. There is an aspect of the occult in this book- spirits and ghosts are mentioned, and play a role in the tragedy, depending on your understanding of those words- but if they do play a role, it is only because people remain susceptible to obsession.
There are other elements in Conrad that we would probably not consider modern. Conrad believes in virtue, for example. It’s inevitably corrupted and destroyed, but it exists and it’s knowable. He also believes in physical courage. People in his books do things, instead of just thinking about things. Nostromo, the main character, is not especially reflective, not neurotic. There’s very little irony. And another quality of the prose is the sense that he is writing from a place of imperturbable calm, attention and equanimity- the Gulfo Placido, maybe, which one character imagines while sailing it at night is ‘a foretaste of death’. From what I do know of Conrad, I’m guessing that he probably did not write from a place of equanimity. But it’s a great illusion.
When I told a friend how much I was enjoying Nostromo, he told me that Nabokov said Conrad was ‘cliched.’ Whatever. Go fuck yourself, Nabokov. Go play with your butterfly collection. -
Nostromo is a very fine book and a great pleasure to read. The first reason is that if you are interested in hearing the opinions of their favourite authors and in Nostromo certainly has a lot of things to say about very many topics. Second, many people are fascinated by Conrad's analysis of United States as an Imperial Power in Latin America.
Unfortunatley, because of Nostromo's good qualities it often makes it way onto to undergraduate course lists where it does not belong. In order to air his views on many of the great politic issues, Conrad invents a fictious country called Costaguana that bears no resemblance to any single Latin American country that ever existed. Conrad wants to express his thoughts on Garibaldi and his followers. For this reason he gives us an expatriate Italian patriarch who fought with Garibaldi. The problem with this is that at the time the largest Italian expatriated community in Latin was in Buenos Aires. There were essentially none in Panama although in other respects Costaguana is made to look like Panama. Costaguana like Panama was extremely isolated from the capital and bitterly resented that the politicians in the capital were stonewalling the project of their region. Panama at the time simply did not have the level of culture that Costaguana does.
What Conrad does very well in Nostromo is to make Europeans and North Americans reflect upon themselves as Imperial powers and upon the Imperial process. However, his setting is an artificial construct with no more reality than one of the planets that Luke Skywalker visited.
Nostromo is a good book but not terribly appropriate for undergraduate readers who could easily get mislead into thinking that Conrad was talking about a specific time, place and event. -
I've tried. I really have. But after one short story (The Secret Sharer) and four novels (Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, Lord Jim and now, Nostromo), I've come to the considered conclusion that I really don't appreciate Conrad. I admire him for his prodigious output, especially since he's a non-native English speaker who only learned to speak the language fluently when he was in his 20s (and even then, reportedly with a strong Polish accent). But with perhaps the exception of The Secret Agent, I find most of his novels tedious with long meandering passages and a profusion of detail that make me wonder - where's he going with this? what's the point of all this?
In the case of Nostromo, we meet Charles Gould who is the heir of the Sao Tome silver mine in Sulaco. After his father dies a broken man, Gould moves to Sulaco with his wife Emilia, determined to make a success of the Gould Concession. The novel putters along for some 388 pages, sketching out the various characters that populate the novel - the Goulds, the crippled Dr Monygham, Giorgio Viola, his wife Teresa and their daughters Linda and Giselle, Don Jose Avellano, his daughter Antonia, her suitor Martin Decoud and of course Nostromo, the indefatigable and indomitable Capataz de Cagadores that all and sundry look to to save the day. Apart from this diverse cast of characters, we also learn about the origins of the Gould Concession, political developments in Costaguana that threaten Sulaco's peaceful prosperity. And then in the last 50 pages of the book, it all comes to a head, twists aplenty, with Nostromo at the centre of it all. Honestly, the plot developments in the last 50 pages made me question whether the preceding 388 pages (or at least 70 percent of them) were even necessary. Probably one and a half stars for this book, which I think would have fared much better as a tightly written short story. -
A Wonderful Book to Have Read
The tense of my title is deliberate. Virginia Woolf described Nostromo as "a difficult book to read through." A Conrad biographer called it "a novel that one cannot read unless one has read it before." I take both these verdicts from the excellent introduction to the Barnes and Noble edition by Brent Hayes Edwards, and they come as some relief. I generally find that introductory essays give away too many plot points, and this is no exception. But having read a little over half the novel without it, I was desperate for some help.
It was not just me. Conrad really does jump all over the place in time, telling the story first from one angle then another. His characters really do play on a half-lighted stage where nobody is quite as they seem, apparent power may vanish in smoke, and some of the most significant events occur in the wings. Early though this is (1904), it marks a distinct break from the late Victorian novel, coming closer to Woolf or even to Faulkner. Its exotic setting, political theme, and moral concerns look forward to Hemingway and Greene, though without their directness of narrative. Conrad's layered chronology, and not just his Latin American locale, more than once had me thinking forward to Gabriel García Márquez. While I might have fallen into the rhythm of the narrative eventually, Edwards' essay helped me put the novel into a modernist context, so I could take the rapid shifts in viewpoint in my stride and not be fazed when Conrad does something extraordinary like jumping a decade into the speculative future.
Conrad's own landfalls in South America as a Polish seaman aboard a British ship were brief, and apparently left little impression; he had to call upon others for help with the setting. All the same, it is amazingly well realized, with detail and atmosphere that convince me, even with my rather longer visits to those parts. His invented country of Costaguana might be anywhere between Costa Rica and Guyana, as the introduction remarks. The specific locale is the port of Sulaco, the San Tomé silver mine in the mountains above, and the surrounding region, isolated from the rest and known as the Occidental Province. When yet another revolution breaks out in the country, the province, protected by its mountains, attempts to secede. You might think of Panama seceding from Colombia in 1903, except that Conrad rearranges his geography to suit his story; this is not history under a pseudonym. It is an unstable country, with new regimes replacing each other more or less violently every few years.
Most of the major characters, though, are of European origin and outlook: Charles Gould, the English owner of the mine, and his recent bride Emilia; Don José Avellanos, the former ambassador, of pure Spanish descent, and his lovely niece Antonia; Martin Decoud, Antonia's admirer, who is introduced as a Parisian flâneur, but becomes a political activist in his own right; Monygham, the embittered Irish doctor; and the title character, Nostromo, an Italian seaman who has earned universal respect as the man who can be trusted to get things done. The name means "bosun" in Italian, but is also a contraction of "nostr'uomo," or "our man." Though a secondary character until quite near the end, he may be the moral touchstone of the story, but even he is not entirely as people see him. Conrad is not primarily a novelist of personal relationships; his characters tend to be seen as individuals reacting to the ethical or political situation around them, often in surprising ways.
Nostromo is not a denunciation of colonialism, as
Heart of Darkness (1899) had been. Those battles are over; Costaguana has gained its independence. But not its stability, and most of the settlers who, like the Gould family, have been there for generations, are anything but settled. It is one of the earliest novels to explore the post-colonial age, and in some respects it goes even further than that. In the barely glimpsed but distantly present American industrialist Holroyd, who funds the mine from his stronghold in San Francisco as the first step towards establishing a North American foothold in the region (and even promoting his particular brand of Christianity), we see distinct pre-echoes of the modern era of colonization by corporations and of politics as a kind of moral evangelism. These are only a few of the topics that Edwards points out in his introduction; the reader will discover many more unaided. Nostromo is a difficult book, requiring intense concentration to read, but it provides much food for thought. And as the curse of the San Tomé silver propels the novel to its tragic but poetic conclusion, it is impossible not to recognize it as a great one. -
Minirecensione in forma di elenco
(agosto 2014)
Trasvolare magistrale da un personaggio all’altro (dal "king of Sulaco" al "capataz de cargadores"), nell’avvolgente oscillare avanti e indietro del tempo e nel complicarsi dei punti di vista; miniera d’argento, ferrovia, feroce politica sudamericana dell’Ottocento; neocolonialismo. -
رواية فخمة ولها جمهورها العريض، لكنها بعيدة عن الأنماط التي أفضّلها.
كونراد كتب رواية ضمّنها كل مقومات النجاح؛ من شخصيات مثيرة للاهتمام، فلسفة فذة، إبداع في رسم الزمان والمكان، رصد التحولات الدخلية والخارجية برويّة وأسلوب ذكي ينم عن عقل خبير متبصّر، وفي مسرح الأحداث كثير من العناصر الشائقة : كنز وثورات، اقتصاد وسياسة وتاريخ بأكمله، بالمجمل رواية شاملة. لكن كاتبها حاز كل أدوات التفوق تلك من دون أن يحسن الربط بينها ووضْع كل منها في موضعه.. فجاء نصّه بارداً ضبابياً، يعطيك الانطباع معظم الوقت بأنك خارج الر��اية ولا تجد لك أرضاً ثابتة تقف عليها لتتلمس ما يجري من حولك.
يُقال أن كونراد يهوى الظُلمة، وأن أفضل مشاهد رواياته هي التي تكتنفها الظلمة. وقد جعلني أتيه في الظلمة فعلاً.
عمل يحتاج قارئ صبور.. أتمنى أن تكون تجربتي القادمة مع الكاتب أفضل. -
Ένα επικό μυθιστόρημα από έναν σπουδαίο συγγραφέα δυστυχώς χάθηκε στη μετάφραση. Αν και άξιζε σίγουρα 4 ή 5 αστέρια μου είναι αδύνατο να βαθμολογήσω μια τόσο κακή μετάφραση και τόσο πρόχειρη έκδοση. Είχε εκδοθεί και παλαιότερα από Ιδεόγραμμα σε μετάφραση της Έφης Καλλιφατίδη, η οποία έχω μάθει ότι ήταν εξαιρετική. Δυστυχώς αυτή η έκδοση είναι εξαντλημένη και δεν μπόρεσα να τη βρω πουθενά.
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This is my third reading of this strange and remarkable book. As I began re-reading the first half of the story, I felt disappointed -- as if my taste as the young student who first read this book had somehow traduced me. There was no central figure in this story: It was certainly not Gian' Battista Fidanza, a.k.a. Nostromo, the handsome capataz de cargadores; nor was it Charles and Emily Gould, owners of the San Tomé silver mine; nor was it the host of other characters that Conrad parades before our eyes.
No, the star was the silver of the mine. During a revolution, Nostromo is charged with sailing a lighter-full of silver -- one of the quarterly shipments from the mine -- to safety and away from the greedy hands of the Monteros and Sotillo. Although there were three people on that lighter that sails away from Sulaco toward Great Isabel Island, what remains is a mystery, a mystery as all three came to evil.
If you see the book from the point of view of that inanimate object, the silver of the mine, you see how it calls the tune to which all the other characters dance. Some manage to survive its pull, such as the Goulds themselves, who see themselves as servants of great wealth, or Father, later Cardinal/Bishop Corbelán, who cares only for souls, or Dr. Monygham, who is too wounded from his own past in the ill-fated Republic of Costaguana to be anything more than a cynical presence.
Nostromo is indeed a great book, but one that requires to be taken on its own merits. Approach it with no preconceptions, and stick with it for the first hundred or so pages. Things happen slowly at first, but then all hell breaks loose. And the most heroic event of all, Nostromo's famous ride to Cayta to hook up with the troops of General Barrios, is seen only in retrospect.
Finally, we see into Nostromo's own mind -- and what we see is what the silver of the mine has done to him. -
‘Nostromo’ is the best illustration of the Resource Curse I’ve ever come across, although the phrase probably didn’t exist when Conrad was writing. It refers to countries that have plentiful natural resources and weak governance as a result of rapacious colonialism, so suffer from political instability and chronic corruption. Nigeria is a commonly cited example. In ‘Nostromo’, Conrad invents a South American country with a history of revolutions and dictatorships, centring his narrative on a silver mine. The concession on the mine belongs to a white man named Gould who was born there, a second or third generation coloniser. The novel proceeds at a dilatory pace to show how obsession with mining the silver overtakes not only Gould but everyone in any contact with the mine’s affairs. And because the mine brings in such wealth, its affairs touch everyone. Although I doubt they were intended, there are definite Marxist subtexts of class struggle and commodity fetishism.
‘Nostromo’ greatly reminded me of a Greek tragedy in which the gods have been replaced by capitalism. It is clear from the beginning that the souls and lives of the characters will be claimed by their great deity, silver. While the plot is full of tension, this is sustained by inexorable threat rather than uncertainty. It isn’t so much a matter of who will be destroyed as how. Romantic love, however passionate, always ends up taking second place to the prospect of wealth. Conrad’s pitiless depiction of imperialist capitalism recalls Zola, although unlike
Germinal ‘Nostromo’ doesn’t drag the reader down into the mine itself. The mine’s destructiveness is existential rather than physical. Although it unleashes extensive political violence, the horror of actually getting silver out of the earth remains unseen.
It took me at least a hundred pages to get into ‘Nostromo’, due to lengthy scene-setting and non-linear narrative. Some of the most exciting and dramatic events are told second hand through a sailor’s chatty anecdotes. Events slowly gather an extraordinary momentum, seemingly external to the characters involved. Nostromo himself is a very distinctive individual, yet it seems unlikely that his personal involvement actually changed the course of events. At first I appreciated the rich texture of the writing and atmospheric description, while struggling to grasp who was who and what was happening. Once that had been established, I read more than 300 pages in a day and was totally fascinated by the political and personal machinations. Conrad has a subtle dramatic flair that richly rewards the reader’s patience. I haven’t found myself so immersed in a novel for several months.
Given other Conrad fiction I’ve read, I wasn’t surprised to find a certain amount of sexism, racism, and antisemitism in the narrative, however the way it manifested was actually quite interesting. The characters who aren’t white men are mostly critiqued via generalisation, while the white men are critiqued with harsh specificity for their individual greed, obsessiveness, pride, cowardice, or foolhardiness. Conrad focuses mercilessly on the flaws of his characters; he is the antithesis of Victor Hugo in this respect. He shows how the silver mine brings out the worst in everyone, rich or poor, man or woman, white or black, politician or worker. Yet, like Greek tragedy, ‘Nostromo’ doesn’t preach. The reader can claim no moral superiority over the characters, whose actions evoke understanding, even sympathy, given the context. This makes the novel all the more powerful as a condemnation of capitalist imperialism and its politics. I’m so glad that I finally got round to reading ‘Nostromo’. While these lines of Mrs. Gould’s don’t end the book, they make a fitting conclusion:An immense desolation, the dread of her own continued life, descended upon the first lady of Sulaco. With a prophetic vision she saw herself surviving alone the degradation of her young ideals of life, of love, of work - all alone in the Treasure House of the World. The profound, blind suffering expression of a painful dream settled on her face with its closed eyes. In the indistinct voice of an unlucky sleeper, lying passive in the toils of a merciless nightmare, she stammered out aimlessly the words -
“Material interests.” -
A masterpiece...
The funny thing is that for about a third of the novel, I had this strange feeling that there is something that was alluding me, something that I was not quite getting, like the story was for ever reason hard to follow and yet at the same time I felt immersed in the story and wanted to read more and more...
The characters seemed as real and as vivid as they possibly could had and still I felt a sense of distance, a fairy tale feeling. As I made my way towards to end, I had a feeling of sudden clearness...the same that a person coming out of the dark has once his eyes get accustomed to the light, a feeling of seeing what you had hoped to see, that is usually joyous in its essence. Not that I wouldn't mind having a second look at it. A novel like this one should be read twice. I still have a feeling that I have missed something.
I was and (usually am) immensely attracted to Conrad's prose, to his words, to his rhythm... However, this time there was something in his writing that had reminded me of South American writers who favor magic realism (but for the life of me I wouldn't be able to define what). It is not exactly the usual definition of it, there are no ghosts and no event that is impossible or hard to believe...but in want of a better word "magic" will have to do.
Nostromo, our men...his name brings recollection of "he was one of us" (Lord Jim)...but who are "we" and who are "they"? The ones to whom we are "the other"? In some ways everything (and everyone) in this story resolves about "our men". He is the personification of the people..and yet such a cast of powerful and credible characters is created.
What a novel! Such a tale of pride, sadness and madness I'm not sure that I will ever read again. It felt as tragic as ancient plays, as beautifully sad to the core as the best of them. The only difference is that this novel hasn't dated...not even a day. Sadly, the tale of exploration, of lords and servants, of desperate fight in the name of "material interest" hasn't aged a day. Sadly, one has to say, for it would be so lovely to be able to say "this sort of thing doesn't happens anymore.", while on the contrary one is forced to say "it happens every day" if not "it happens more and more often..."
For me, the words "material interest" will forever haunt every memory of this novel. However, I guess that to fully understand the implications, you really have to read the novel. Or perhaps I'm just saying that to get you to read the novel...just in case my (pretty obvious) praise had failed. -
Δεν ξέρω αν αυτό σημαίνει καλή λογοτεχνία. Ούτε θεωρώ σωστό να μιλήσω με τόσο κολακευτικά λόγια για ένα έργο που δε θεωρείται και αριστούργημα. Περισσότερο απ όλα δε θέλω να πάρω κάποιον στο λαιμό μου και να με βρίζει μετά (ονόματα δε λέμε) ομως αυτό δεν είναι απλά λογοτεχνία. Είναι μελωδία, μουσική γραμμένη με λέξεις τοποθετημένες με απόλυτη ακρίβεια και απίστευτο λυρισμό. Κάθε λέξη και μια νότα, κάθε πρόταση και ένα μουσικό θέμα, κάθε κεφάλαιο και ένα μέρος ενός κονσέρτου που εύχεσαι να μην τελειώσει ποτέ.
Υ.Γ. Μη δίνετε σημασία... μπορεί να φταίει η καραντίνα!!! -
There are two primary components to this novel - it begins as a kind of proto-modernist experiment in telling the story of a place, and ends as a more conventional psychological symbolic work.
Nostromo opens with a long look of a land in turmoil, driven by forces of modernity and globalization that will be entirely recognizable to the contemporary reader, as we still live very much within the same horizon as this novel. Conrad tells the story of different elements of society in conflict in his fictional town of Sulaco in the fictional republic of Costaguana from one point of view at a time, cycling through the unfolding events in a rotating cast of characters.
This is a book largely about modernity's orphans. Romanticism and cynicism intertwine in an intoxicating atmosphere of rootless men seeking to make their fortunes or forget their misfortunes in faraway forgotten shores, and I was reminded somewhat of the mood one gets from Stefan Zweig or Graham Greene. This is a register that I find extremely attractive.
Conrad's shifting gaze does a terrific job of giving us a panoramic view of events from many different perspectives, and for me this is the best and most successful part of the book. But it comes at a cost. By resisting the impulse to identify strongly with any particular point of view, we are left without a protagonist to anchor the action, and there is no one we can altogether love or find completely satisfying.
The second aspect of the book comes to ascendency in the final act of the book, when the larger events fall away and we move in to take a much closer look at the titular character of Nostromo. Here we are on more familiar ground in Conrad's oeuvre. He writes a kind of philosophical-psychological novel where different characters represent different recognizable types, and their fates are instructive with respect to the strengths and weaknesses of the attitudes they embody. Here we cannot be completely satisfied, because there is something reductive and pedagogical in his approach, and it doesn't altogether reflect our experience of life. It may be true, as Heraclitus said, that a man's character is his fate, but there is such a thing as contingency, too.
It only became clear to me at the end that Conrad's great model for this work is Wagner's Ring - at least, its social and psychological symbolism, as Conrad strips out its metaphysical speculation. Nostromo is Sigfried, Decoud is Odin, Charles Gould is Alberich, and the San Tomé mine is the Rheingold.
Alas, we have no Brünnhilde - Conrad lacks Wagner's profound sympathy for and insight into women. There is no woman in Nostromo who is not defined primarily in relationship to a man.
This novel is best at its weirdest. I've never seen anything quite like its characterization of a particular time and place, and I think he saw very deeply into the economic, political, social, and psychological forces alive around him. He has a shakier command of the symbolic content of the book, and the ending, which is merely clever, disappoints. -
DNF at 85 pages. This was a second attempt. I was so bored I couldn't make myself go on. I think I got to about 150 the first try. Maybe I'll push through it some day after I've read and enjoyed other books by Conrad.
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“She was highly gifted in the art of human intercourse which consists in delicate shades of self-forgetfulness and in the suggestion of universal comprehension.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
I’m opening this review with a quote that to me personally seems to reveal something of this novel’s complexity. Universal comprehension, the suggestion of what lies beneath the surface, at times even mysticism…all of this can be found in this novel, for Conrad’s works are very profound and complex. It is deeply ironic that in his own time, the critics failed to see the greatness of his works and hence he was considered to be a writer of nautical (adventure) stories. While many of his works have a nautical setting, they are much more meaningful then any mere adventure story could ever be. What kind of novel is this? A true masterpiece...there is no easier way to describe this novel. It is among the best that Conrad’s prose has to offer. So, if you happen to like this author, you must give it a try. If you have read and liked any of his other words, you will probably like this one as well.
The funny thing is that for about a third of the novel, I had this strange feeling that there is something that was alluding me, something that I was not quite able to understand, some subtle message I wasn't receiving, some hidden message I was not quite getting, like the story was for some reason hidden for me. It didn’t exactly felt hard to follow, but it did require concentration and yet at the same time I felt completely immersed in the story. Every moment of reading it was like being caught in some magical place and all I wanted to do was to read more and more...
The characters seemed as real and as vivid as they possibly could have. I related to the characters on personal level. However, I still felt a sense of distance, this uncanny almost fairy- tale like feeling of being surrounded by characters that feel both human and above human (kind of larger than life). As I made my way towards to end, I had a feeling of sudden clearness...I will never forget it. This feeling it was the similar to a feeling that a person coming out of the dark experiences once his eyes get accustomed to the light, a feeling of finally seeing, the mere joy of seeing being mixed with the happiness of experiencing your surroundings. Moreover, it was more than just seeing, it was seeing what you had hoped to see. That feeling of having your hopes fulfilled is usually joyous in its essence. Not that I wouldn't mind having a second look at it. A novel like this one should be read twice. I still have a feeling that I have missed something. I still want to read it another time, have another go, see what I might have missed.
I was and (still am) immensely attracted to Conrad's prose, to his words, to his rhythm...Nevertheless, this novel felt unique in one way. You see, this time there was something in his writing that had reminded me of South American writers who favour magic realism (but for the life of me I wouldn't be able to define what). It is not exactly the usual definition of it, there are no ghosts and no event that is impossible or hard to believe...but in want of a better word "magic" will have to do.
“...all this life, must be life, since it is so much like a dream.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
Nostromo, our men...his name brings recollection of "he was one of us" (Lord Jim) ...but who are "we" and who are "they"? The ones to whom we are "the other"? In some ways everything (and everyone) in this story resolves about "our men". He is the personification of the people (perhaps in a similar way Lord Jim is). However, despite the fact that the protagonist is so impressive, the other characters do not fall in his shadow. The reason for that is naturally the fact that the characterisation of other characters is very successful. Indeed, such a cast of powerful and credible characters is hard to find in any novel that I can think of. All the characters are created with much detail and finesse.
What a novel it is! Such a tale of pride, sadness and madness I'm not sure that I will ever read again. It felt as tragic as ancient plays, as beautifully sad to the core as the best of them. The only difference is that this novel hasn't dated...not even a day. Sadly, the tale of exploration, of lords and servants, of desperate fight in the name of "material interest" hasn't aged a day. Sadly, one has to say, for it would be so lovely to be able to say "this sort of thing doesn't happen anymore.", while on the contrary one is forced to say "it happens every day" if not "it happens more and more often..."
“It was another of Nostromo's triumphs, the greatest, the most enviable, the most sinister of all. In that true cry of undying passion that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the genius of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love.”
― Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
For me, the words "material interest" will forever haunt every memory of this novel. However, I guess that to fully understand the implications, you really have to read the novel. It is certainly a must read. Or perhaps I'm just saying that to get you to read the novel...just in case my (pretty obvious and not at all subtle) praise had failed. I really do love this novel.
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While he is introduced to Conrad's novel only incidentally and fragmentarily, Nostromo gradually rises to dominate this story of a South American country tormented by constant revolutions. Nostromo himself is something of a liminal character, caught betwixt and between. Indebted to the aristocratic Blancos, his submerged resentments put him on the side of the people he defends the Blancos from. At least theoretically. For Nostromo acknowledges the oppression of his fellow cargo handlers and the peasantry and Indians that work the mine that forms the focal point of the story, the item and its treasure over which the Blancos and revolutionaries battle. No matter, because for whomever falls under the mine's temptations becomes hardened, cold, and willing to separate himself from his ethics and honor. So it is with Nostromo, who for just a portion of the mine becomes corrupted until the very end of things.
It is a marvelous story. And Conrad is on to using the full force of literary manipulation at his call. In this case, that means his subtle shifts in time and perspective as well as sliding almost seamlessly between the stories of several different characters. And he has moments of shock as well. Like a Hitchcock movie, Psycho, Conrad is not averse to doing away with a central character some three quarters way through the book with whom the reader has begun to identify as someone redeemed from frivolous aspirations, made honorable, and prepared to sacrifice love for duty.
Too, the level of psychological study is nothing short of astounding. Not just Nostromo comes under observation, but the motivations and fears of at least a dozen other characters also undergoes thorough examination. The conflicts within that make humanity such an unpredictable and sometimes terror filled or horror laden entity rounds out the landscape of Conrad's canvas -
Once I got past the first few pages, I was completely into this amazing book. Written in 1904 but oh so relevant today as if Conrad could see into the future.
Definitely not for people who have short attention spans -- this one demands your complete attention and concentration. -
This one's tough to review. I want to recommend it to everyone, but that's probably just a waste of a lot of time. I read this about ten years ago as a young college student, and just re-read it. Even while re-reading, the only things I remember are i) wondering to myself, if this book is called Nostromo, why is Nostromo absent for most of the book? ii) a short passage about bringing people into a paradise of snakes, and iii) Nostromo saying to himself "If I see smoke coming from over there, they are lost." I have no idea why I remembered iii), but there you go.
The trick is, this book is great, but only if you've already done a *lot* of reading, particularly of the late nineteenth and early century's best novelists. Proust helps a lot. So does James. Even the less difficult modernists, like Forster, are useful. But Nostromo is not like Ulysses. I didn't understand Ulysses, but Joyce's writing is nice and there are some jokes to keep you going. Conrad's style here is wonderful, but not the sort of wonderful that keeps you going on its own. You need to be able to follow the plot, and you have to learn how to follow it.
But if you're either well-read or dedicated enough, this must be one of the best 50 novels- maybe even 20- of the twentieth century. The characters are hard to get a handle on, but once you do, they're extraordinary. Conrad's way of presenting the story is formally amazing. I've also been reading Genette's 'Narrative Structures,' and the tools in that book help make sense of this one (although Nostromo also shows up the problems with Genette's concepts, since they function best in first person narratives and not so well with third person narratives). The narrative seems to be all over the place. You get the consequences of and event before you get the event; you get two line summaries of what seem to be (but aren't) the most important events... and so it goes.
So do yourself a favour. Read the first four chapters. If you don't get into them, just stop and try it again ten years later. But keep trying!
