FIRST LINE REVIEW: "In the time of Spanish rule, and for many years afterwards, the town of Sulaco -- the luxuriant beauty of the orange gardens bears witness to its antiquity -- had never been commercially anything more important than a coasting port with a fairly large local trade in ox-hides and indigo." Conrad's supposed "masterpiece" strives to make Sulaco much more than important, but I really struggled to care. I broke my "rule" and plodded on past page 5o because of reviews that said that it got so much better after the first 50 or so pages. Um...not much so, in my opinion. This one just refused to make me care and it consequently dragged and dragged...bleh

Joseph Conrad's 1904 novel Nostromo is set in Costaguana, a fictional South American country (though clearly based on Colombia and Panama) that has seen continuous waves of dictatorships and popular uprisings, reducing it to a poor backwater. But things are looking up for its western province where Charles Gould, native-born but of English ancestry, opens a silver mine with the backing of an American magnate and a British railroad company. Conrad's interest is the tension between the European residents of Sulaco, who think that their financial interests are bringing stability and prosperity to a dysfunctional state, and the Costaguanan peasants who think that foreigners are plundering their land. After reading Nostromo, I'm pretty confident now that Conrad was a colonialist and a racist, as some critics have long charged, but I think he was a nuanced one.

Initially, we get only allusions to Nostromo, an Italian immigrant who distinguishes himself as the leader of the port's longshoremen and by his readiness to undertake difficult tasks for the Europeans. Everyone calls him the "indispensable man" and he becomes a Costaguanan national myth, but he remains an enigma for much of the novel. Eventually Nostromo's story, his thirst for recognition and wealth, takes over and and relegates the political drama to the background.

Unfortunately, I found Nostromo tedious. Conrad called this 400-page depiction of a whole society his "largest canvas", and he gets so involved in world-building that there's no dramatic push. Only about halfway through do we start to see a glimmer of a plot. If your only previous experience with Conrad (as I think is the case with many potential readers) is Heart of Darkness, where the action flows as steadily as the Congo River that is the work's setting, then you may well be frustrated by the slow pace of this novel. Also, Conrad's peculiar English (he didn't speak the language regularly until the age of 20) is intriguing at shorter spans but here just contributes to the burdensome nature of getting through this book. I appreciate a number of elements of Conrad's art, but I find it hard to recommend this.

I read the Wordsworth Classics edition of this book. It features a decent introduction and footnotes by scholar Robert Hampson, as well as a glossary of the foreign-language terms sprinkled throughout the text. Unfortunately, the quality of Wordsworth Classics publications leaves much to be desired and after a single reading the binding and paper where beginning to fall apart.

The complexity and richness of 'Nostromo' are overwhelming. I found it extraordinary that a novel that narrates the history of a country could at the same time provide such a deep psychological investigation of its characters. We are sometimes taken through years and countries, and other times exposed to thorough discussions of specific characters' feelings and motivations. These impossible transitions between scales occur smoothly due to Conrad's masterful storytelling. I became very attached to certain characters, specifically Martin Decoud and Giorgio Viola.

All this praise being given, I should mention that 'Nostromo' was a very hard read for me, often felt extremely slow paced and took me almost a month to finish.

Um dos melhores livros que já li. História cativante sobre a a política sul-americana

I read [b:Heart of Darkness|4900|Heart of Darkness |Joseph Conrad|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1375061721s/4900.jpg|2877220] in High School and fell head-over-heels. I thought [a:Chinua Achebe|8051|Chinua Achebe|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1294661664p2/8051.jpg] had to be mistaken about Conrad's racism, because this was the primal anti-imperial text (I'm white -- a lot of us have made this mistake). I started to doubt my good opinion of Conrad by the time I tried [b:Lord Jim|12194|Lord Jim|Joseph Conrad|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1372366969s/12194.jpg|2578988] a few years later. I saw it first in the thing closest to me -- his portrayal of women, as bad as something out of Jack London's Sea Wolf.

But Nostromo is a spectacular failure. In between dense and tedious explanations of landscapes you'll get surprised by nice little morsels of racism, classism, and misogyny. The story is essentially about how the rich imperialists (the characters in the story with thoughts, names, and good taste) use overseers and foremen (a kind of upper-working class, also with names, but fewer thoughts and worse taste) to hold off the 'rabble' (people without names or thoughts or motivations beyond savage bloodlust, who have no business governing themselves, or enjoying the fruits of their own labor).

Or, as [a:Howard Zinn|1899|Howard Zinn|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1245211489p2/1899.jpg] put it:
"These people--the employed, the somewhat privileged--are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls."

Well, they may not obey perfectly. But they do the big jobs. And the system keeps on ticking.