Title: Nostromo
Author: Joseph Conrad
Genre: Classic
Pages: 448
Rating: 2.5 of 5

This is my third Joseph Conrad book, and I don’t know if I’ll bother with any more. He creates memorable, believable characters and situations, but his message/theme is always the same and is just plain depressing. He basically finds different ways to say “Society is rife with exploitation and everyone is vain, greedy, cruel, violent, and/or cowardly” while describing any action in the most dully dispassionate way possible and unexpectedly throwing in flashbacks or sudden leaps forward.

In Nostromo we follow the political travails of a fictional South American country, focusing especially on Nostromo, the vain Italian expatriate who is foreman of the dockworkers. He is constantly flattered and used as a tool by the European aristocracy but never really admitted to their society. Most of the conflicts, personal and political, revolve around the local silver mine as the story illustrates that “the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.”

The narrations is surprisingly dull for a book about violent revolution. It focuses primarily on the pettiness, vanity, and greed of individuals and skips quickly over any large-scale action, mentioning it fairly dismissively in flashback form. Four hundred forty-eight tightly-packed pages of this was a bit much, and I was thoroughly tired of it by the end. If you’re interested in Conrad, I’d recommend Heart of Darkness over this one… all of the vivid bleakness with a fraction of the page count packs a much bigger punch.

And one final thing: I am using this as my Classic with a single-word title over at the Back to the Classics Challenge.