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 are on more familiar ground in Conrad's oeuvre. 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. 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. This is a register that I find extremely attractive.Ĭonrad'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. 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 book largely about modernity's orphans. 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. 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. 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.

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