Wealth of nations...

In the harbour town of Sulaco, on the coast of the South American country of Costaguana, the silver mine of San Tomé is a source of great wealth to its English owner, Charles Gould, as well as to the local economy and the Costaguanan government. When yet another political upheaval threatens to bring down the dictatorship of President Ribiera, Gould’s first inclination is to provide support to shore up Ribiera’s tottering regime. But other voices in the multinational community of Sulaca have another suggestion – to break up the nation and set up an independent state with the mine at its heart. As reports arrive that the forces of the leader of the latest revolution are about to arrive in the town, Gould orders Nostromo, the incorruptible, indispensable “Capataz de Cargadores” (Overseer of the Dockers) to take the latest batch of silver offshore in a lighter ship so the revolutionaries can’t get their hands on it. But an accident occurs which leads Nostromo to hide the silver on an island in the bay, while he returns to the town only to be given another dangerous mission… to journey over the mountains to summon aid for the beleaguered town.

Set around the turn of the 19th/20th centuries, this isn’t about the impact of political colonialism as in Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim. Rather it’s a look at the even more destructive and insidious economic colonisation by capitalist countries of those nations whose resources they exploit while taking no responsibility for the adverse impacts of their actions. The major capital investment in the mine comes from America, giving us an early warning of the way the wealthy and powerful US would abuse their neighbours and distort their political development for their own greedy purpose – a situation that continues to the present day, giving the book an unsettling relevance. However, it’s not the Americans alone whom Conrad shows as exploiters – Britain, through the Englishman Gould, and Spain, through the old aristocracy of the town, are both shown as earlier waves in the continuous rape of the southern continent. All the major characters in the book, and in Sulaca, are foreigners either by birth or heritage, while the indigenous Costaguanans are relegated, quite intentionally, to being nothing but helpless pawns and onlookers, dirt poor amidst the fabulous wealth being extracted from beneath their land.

Costaguana is apparently geographically based on Colombia, but in terms of its political identity, it could be any one of a number of South or Central American states, or African, or indeed anywhere else that the West has exploited in its rapacious history. I found it completely believable, both physically and culturally, and gradually described with such detailed clarity it’s hard to believe that Sulaca isn’t real.

Nostromo is an intriguing character, although I found he was a little too caricatured to ring wholly true. Italian, he too is an incomer, but for him wealth is not the major motivation. He wants to be respected, for his character, integrity and courage, and to a large degree he is. The leaders of Sulacan society turn to him whenever they have a problem, and trust him absolutely. But they never treat him as one of themselves – his nickname, Nostromo, could be taken to mean “shipmate”, but it also could be a contraction of “nostro uomo”, meaning “our man”, and this is how the upper-classes treat him, as a faithful servant to be used as required. Eventually this treatment will have its effect on Nostromo, threatening that very integrity for which he is valued.

With Gould, Conrad shows how this class of economic colonialists see themselves as always separate from and above the countries in which they choose to make their fortune. Gould is third generation Costaguanan in terms of where his family has physically resided, but sent home to England to be educated, utterly English in his national allegiance, and of course, when it’s time to marry, selecting an English bride. None of this makes him feel he doesn’t have the right to use his economic power to influence the politics of this country to which he has no real loyalty, and he uses that power solely for the benefit of himself and the foreign elite who run the town, with no concern whatsoever for what might benefit or harm the indigenous Costaguanans.

Conrad’s portrayals of Gould and particularly of his wife, Emilia, are more nuanced, I feel, than that of Nostromo, and several of the secondary characters are very well drawn too: the Frenchman Degoud, who drifts into involvement in politics rather unintentionally because of his developing passion for the daughter of one of the leaders of this society; that leader himself, Don José Avallanos, descended from the old Spanish conquistadors and now part of the decaying aristocracy of Costaguana; Giorgio Viola, the old Italian innkeeper who once fought alongside Garibaldi; the various Generals on all sides of the conflict, all only too recognisable to the modern reader as representative of the type who would as easily start a coup as defend against it, for their own political and personal gain.

In terms of the writing style, this seemed to me more straightforward than the other few Conrads I’ve read. It does jump about in time and requires constant concentration and occasional back-tracking, but for once it isn’t told as a narrated story within a story, so thankfully none of those nested quotation marks that turn some of his other books into brain-frazzling puzzles to follow. There are lots of Spanish words sprinkled throughout the text, so the included glossary in my Oxford World’s Classics edition was very welcome – indeed, essential. But his prose is so wonderful and he is so insightful about humanity in its individual and social state that I forgive him totally for being hard to read. This is undoubtedly one of the best books I’ve ever read, and gets my highest recommendation.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Oxford World’s Classics.

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Definitely Conrad's most accomplished novel. Of course the reading is very difficult because of the continually shifting in time, space and narrator, yet this is very clevery done. The core of the story is how silver can make even the hardest rock grow weak. Nostromo, that's us all!
(Rating 3.5 stars)

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

Having never heard of this book I wasn't really sure what to expect but since it was Joseph Conrad I knew it would be worth trying. And it definitely well worth it. The story is set in a fictional South American country that has been torn apart by corruption, power and greed for centuries and the attempts of a wealthy mine owner and his most trusted friend and employee, the title character Nostromo, to bring peace and stability to the country. At first it seems like they may succeed but then events take a turn for the worse and despite their best intentions the country descends into anarchy and revolution once again. It is in these times that the true power of money and lure of fame comes to light. Conrad has created a cast of characters that are not perfect and are far more real and relatable for it as they are caught up in events beyond their control. His writing is vivid and engrossing, although it may be a little too detailed in places slowing the pace of the story a little, but this can be forgiven given the pace and gripping nature of the rest of the story.