Nostromo (1904)

The subtitle of this hefty novel by Joseph Conrad is A Tale of the Seaboard. A description I saw called it a rip-roaring adventure story, which led me to a few errant expectations. Nostromo is the name of a person, not a ship as I had assumed. And “seaboard” is not the same as “seagoing,” although perhaps the best part of this shaggy dog is a treacherous if brief sea voyage. The other best part is the treatment of South America’s long history of unstable politics, the colonizers’ greed for riches and lust for power. The novel at large, in fact, seems to be mainly a lampoon (as I take it) of South America’s ludicrous and bloody history, set in a fictional country, or territory. It’s not far from Venezuela, with a shipping port and a silver mine owned by an English businessman. Nostromo is barely present for the first half or so, seen at the edges of the large rotating cast of characters. Conrad is more expansive here, going deep into the backstories of these characters—and new important characters keep emerging beyond the halfway point. It’s a serialized novel and often feels it but Conrad brings it to a solid ending, taking it where it must go according to the richly complex characters. It ends up landing on Nostromo the hardest, as it must with that title. Nostromo, a sort of hapless but brave peasant, gets by mostly on bravado and luck, along with his skills as a seaman. I have to say, even with all the cruelty on display—I see South America’s reputation as a haven for terrible torture goes back at least to 1904—it often feels comical more than anything. The revolutions and patriotic fervor result only in terrible violence and death but still things go on. All officials are at least a little corrupt, some very much so. Part of Nostromo’s appeal is his sincere peasant background. His highest military rank is captain, but he is a man of the people. He has several names, suggesting his status as a legend: Capataz de Cargadores, Gian’ Battista, Captain Fidanza, Nostromo. His background is Italian. I still think Conrad is mostly a chore to read, but patience does pay off. This story ends quite satisfyingly.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Heart of Darkness (1899)

Last time through Joseph Conrad's short but exceedingly dense novel I realized how entwined it can be taken in many ways with horror, doing the kinds of things Algernon Blackwood ("The Willows"), H.P. Lovecraft ("At the Mountains of Madness"), and David Lynch (Blue Velvet) before and after it do in terms of animating and super-charging landscapes and setting. I also realized, as Marlow struggles to get the steamboat up the river, how reminiscent it can be as well of Mark Twain's riverboat tales. It is ultimately a grand adventure tale with a necessarily dismal ending. The scene where the boat is stuck in fog—my favorite part—put me in a King Kong frame of mind, which lingered into the encounters with jungle and natives. Conrad's plodding, stultifying language is easier to take with patience (also required for swaths of 19th-century horror so I've had practice lately). I had to laugh early when even Marlow's listeners in the frame story groaned when they could tell he was about to launch into another one. Heart of Darkness insists that you read it slowly, which might account for why so many consider it a novel rather than the long story it is. All the good parts are embedded in long droning paragraphs but they will come to you if you let them. There are manifest problems with use of the N-word and with racism generally. At the same time, it is essentially a parable about colonialism so I'm willing to give it some license. To be clear, the "heart of darkness" is not anything about skin tone. The worst people here are white, which starts with the madman gone native inside his own head, Kurtz, but also includes the "pilgrims" traveling on the steamer, who enjoy taking potshots at natives from the boat, the way 19th-century Americans fired at buffalo from trains. Fans of Apocalypse Now may or may not like the novel (novella, whatever). I don't have much sense of that. My experience was that the Conrad disappointed me after the high-flying hallucinatory impact of the movie, but as I say I have often struggled with it. It is slow and ponderous yet full of insidiously great concrete detail, such as the heads spiked on the fence around Kurtz's house all facing the house. As the tale winds into the interior it finally casts an inexorable mesmerizing spell.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

The Secret Agent (1907)

For some time now I've been poking at the 1998 Modern Library list of the 100 Best 20th-Century Novels (see the Novels tab). I have a number of complaints about it, as I have about practically every institutionalized attempt at such honorifics, from the Baseball Hall of Fame to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to the Oscars, Grammys, and Miss America pageant. It's a flawed list, in short. I have felt free to go picking and choosing—I will never read Finnegans Wake (#77), I can say with some certainty. As further tonic, I paired it with Larry McCaffery's list of the 20th Century's Greatest Hits, another pack of 100 novels, with approximately 30% overlap. McCaffery's list leans more toward currents of the second half of the century. I will probably read even fewer of them in the long run, as it includes not only Finnegans Wake (at #10) but also Gertrude Stein's Making of Americans (at #7) and other such phonebook-sized blasts of dense non-narrative language. I like the cheek of McCaffery to make his #1 not Ulysses but Pale Fire—inspired choice. Then he makes Ulysses his #2. I guess some things you just can't get away from (not that I'm carping about something I don't know—I'm looking forward to finally getting to it). Gravity's Rainbow is #3, and so forth.

I've made my peace with the Modern Library list, even for all its flaws, as I keep finding books I love on it. I've already been aware of most of them, but not all, and some of the finds have been very fine indeed. But Joseph Conrad happens to be an example of one of the list's greatest flaws, so a ritual airing of grievances must now briefly proceed. My main problem with the list may be expressed as a bad case of Usual-Suspectivitis, combined with a kind of willful blindness toward such writers as Toni Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. To make matters worse, the one problem exacerbates the other. The list is the result of polling the 10 members of the Modern Library editorial board at the time (names I know include A.S. Byatt, Shelby Foote, William Styron, and Gore Vidal), which is a fairly small and doubtless insular sample in the first place. It would be interesting to see the titles that fell 101-200, because then we might get a sense of how the list would change if the simple limitation of one title per author were imposed. Not that I'm necessarily in favor of it—I know it's arbitrary and precludes a certain perspective of how relatively dominating single figures might be—but I'm really not in favor of the clustered-up redundancies in the final list either.

"An Outpost of Progress" (1897)

Read story by Joseph Conrad online.

Joseph Conrad has typically been tough for me to read. He can be ponderous, and in many ways, perhaps, this story shows the problems. The first paragraph alone covers most of the first two pages. But the story is on the long side for a short story, nearly 30 pages, which allows space to set a narrative rhythm that slowly but surely becomes riveting. It's set in colonial Africa, where two white European men, Kayerts and Carlier, have just been delivered to the outpost of progress in the title, an isolated fortification on a river, in a jungle, 300 miles away from the nearest office of the company that has installed them there. Though the story stays close to these two men at the outpost, the omniscient narrator occasionally shifts away to provide helpful information. Kayerts and Carlier are there for the sake of their careers and have little interest in Africa or the natives beyond what they need to minimally meet their duties. They don't do much. They talk to one another a lot. They discover literature. A third company official, described by Conrad in his blunt and dated manner as "a Sierra Leone nigger, who maintained that his name was Henry Price," is more the one running things there. Late in the story, after Kayerts and Carlier have been there five months and are expecting to see again soon their company official superior, who originally accompanied them there, things take a dark turn. Armed revolutionaries show up and stalk around the camp. Price—whose real name is Makola—meets with them and keeps Kayerts and Carlier out of the talks. From there, things begin to go wrong in bad ways quickly. It's a story we've known for some time, which is that little good comes of powerful white Europeans put in charge of natives in foreign lands. Conrad's story takes time to get up to full speed, but its power becomes immense. It goes in many directions at once, like a bomb exploding, and with shrapnel too. It's remarkable. Conrad's universe is a uniquely bleak place, and this story (which he considered his best) is a clinic in how he does it, starting with those long, long paragraphs that transport you inexorably to the interior.

Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine