In the Library
Nostromo
Joseph Conrad, 1904
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 12 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 29
- Length
- Length 168k words
£1.99
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Any one can declaim about these things, but I pin my faith to material interests.
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The reading guide, in the app
How to Read Nostromo
Conrad's most ambitious novel defeats most readers in the first fifty pages for a reason that is neither the prose nor the complexity but the chronology, which he has deliberately scrambled, and once you understand that the scrambling is intentional you can stop trying to reconstruct the timeline and start reading the novel as it actually works.
The novel has defeated more well-intentioned readers than almost anything in the English language, and the reason is almost always the opening fifty pages, which arrive in a deliberately disorienting rush of landscape, history, competing voices, and anachrony, and which seem to refuse the basic orientation that a novel is supposed to provide. You are in Costaguana, a fictional republic on the South American coast, during a period of political upheaval, surrounded by characters whose relationships are unclear and whose histories keep arriving before their introductions. This is not a failure of narrative competence; it is a formal decision that reflects the novel's subject, which is the way historical events exceed any individual's ability to comprehend them as they happen.
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About the book
On the Golfo Plácido, a gulf so black a man cannot see his own hands, Nostromo rows a lighter heavy with silver into the dark to keep it from a revolution. He is the most trusted man in Sulaco, an Italian capataz whose entire fortune is what the docks believe of him: that he cannot be bought. Conrad invented a whole South American republic, Costaguana, its mountains and feuds and ruined idealists, only to set one silver mine at its heart and watch what the metal does to everyone who touches it. Charles Gould gives his soul to the lode until his wife Emilia loses the husband to the institution he becomes. And the silver, once buried, begins its slow work on the one incorruptible man, who can neither return it nor stop guarding it. Conrad tells it all out of order, the cost felt before the accounting, so you grasp too late what material interests truly take: not a man's honesty, but the self he most needed to believe in.