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| While not a coastal picture, I found this one so deliciously bohemian that I had to include it. Much of my Semana Santa found me ensconced in a hammock valiantly continuing my struggle with Nostromo, if only for a few pages |
As I
posted on this blog, finding the time to read over the past year was something
of an issue. I took Nostromo along with
me on our Spring Break trip to Puerto Escondido and delighted in the fact that
I was reading this coastal adventure story while also away on my own coastal
adventure story. I also managed to sneak
in an hour here and there to read a few pages between classes; however, the
exhilaration of daily life paired with the exhaustion of teaching and the
irresistible warmth of the Mexican sun and conspired to lull me to sleep while
struggling with Conrad’s passages. More
often than not, I jolted awake to find that half an hour or so had passed and I
was still on the same paragraph.
After
Mexico I found more time to read, but was often so exhausted from farm work of
the highs and lows of life on a farm that my progress was sporadic and
jerky. But, spurred primarily by my
decision to move to Warsaw, I managed to speed through the last half of
Nostromo and conclude the novel mere days before I left the country. Once in Warsaw, though, I was so busy
experiencing life in a new country and (even more intense) experiencing life as
a preschool teacher. Before I knew it,
days had turned into weeks and then months and I still had not found the time
or the words to talk about Conrad’s masterpiece.
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| While I had delighted in Nostromo's intersection of Italian and Latin American, I was even more delighted at the discovery that Conrad was Polish. Perhaps it's appropriate, then, that Nostromo occupied so much of the last year and its own intersection of Italian, Latin American, and Polish. |
It was
not just circumstance, however, that left me spending a year with Nostromo. No, some of the blame I will shift onto
Conrad and the erratic timeline his novel took.
The story of Nostromo is more than a story of a reportedly incorruptible
sailor; it spans the full breadth of the Costaguanan town of Sulaco and its
inhabitants. The reader learns of a
sequence of events that took place in this fictional country as they revolved
around the feats and, ultimately, the fate of the cargadero Nostromo, but the
reader is also treated to the histories of the country’s tumultuous political past,
as well as the personal stories of several of Sulaco’s prominent citizens. These histories, rich in detail, serve to
give flesh to this country, to make its fate and the fate of its people
important to the reader, to bind them to us in a way and to keep us turning the
pages. I did not object to this; in
fact, as I read, I did form attachments to characters as I learned of their
various pasts and motives. No, what I
objected to was the manner in which Conrad presented these stories. The narrative would often jump in time with
no indication that we had done so. I
would find myself reading passages set in the novel’s present tense and then
find myself immersed in the history of a year past or three years past without
any clue from the author that we had made a transition. This method, while important to both plot and
character development, served to confuse me and necessitated more than once a
rereading of one or several pages.
I
suppose that the case may be made that I am, in fact, to blame for this
confusion. As I have said before, I am a
casualty of my generation. I am so
spoiled by modern theatrical storytelling that I have become unused to the styles
and tactics of older generations. I have
become accustomed to seeing the passage of time represented with a slow fade to
black or white, or with a cheesy montage set to music, or (for the viewers who
lack imagination and need facts set before them clearly and unmistakably) with
white lettering floating across the screen informing the viewer that the following
scenes are set “one year later” or “one year ago,” etc. In short, I have seen too many films and TV
shows, so when confronted by a timeline that shifted without convenient
cinematic clues to alert me, I was left to struggle with my own confusion and
frustration.
This one
complaint aside, though, I found to my own surprise that I actually quite
enjoyed Nostromo. One review I read said
that the novel’s greatest strength was in creating characters so rich in detail
that they became real, they became people with pasts with whom the reader could
form a connection and to whom we could cleave to. I found this to be the case for me. I was so invested in the fates of favorite characters
that I wanted almost to flip forward in the book, to speed through the book and
discover their individual endings. To
present a concrete example, one such character was the town’s doctor. From the outset this character was presented
in a negative light. It was evident that
few of the townspeople liked the doctor, and many made little effort to conceal
their feelings. For almost two thirds of
the novel the doctor appeared a shady character with questionable motives,
saved only by his apparent loyalty to the central and much loved female
characters. Eventually, though, we are
given insight into the doctor’s past and it is there that Conrad’s prose shines
with clarity and poignancy and sheer beauty.
Conrad’s descriptions of the doctor, his troubled past and his daily
struggles are so detailed and complex, and peppered with beautiful (if
terrible) imagery that they immediately lend the reader understanding and
compassion. In a matter of pages, the
doctor, previously a tertiary character, largely unimportant to the reader or
to the progression of the novel, transformed into a dynamic and central
character in whom the reader could invest emotion and care.
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| Late Autumn in Warsaw: as the last vestiges of summer's greenery give way to the vibrancy of autumn, I turn my attention to the north of Africa with Albert Camus' The Plague. |
The
central plot of Nostromo—the story of how an incorruptible sailor was tempted,
tested, and ultimately destroyed—composes a relatively short story. If one were to cut out the exposition,
excising the histories and insights into the various characters, the story of
Nostromo could be condensed into a short story or modern-day parable: a proud
man is tested by a dangerous situation and gives in to the temptations of greed
and ego, destroying himself and others.
While this is an interesting and at times exciting story, it would be
insignificant and forgettable without its rich, descriptive prose. Conrad so convincingly describes scenarios of
madness, grief, shame, disgrace and despair that one could easily imagine him
living each episode himself in some hellish nightmare of an existence. Though terrible at times, these descriptions
were so vivid and so eloquently phrased that for pages at a time I forgot any
complaints I had against Conrad and gave myself over to the allure of a
masterfully told story.
When I
started Nostromo I feared that I might at last have encountered a novel that I
could not endorse as fitting among the ranks of the other great novels I had
read. As I struggled continuously to
orient myself in the ever-changing timeline, this fear was repeated over and
over again. More than once I even
contemplated abandoning this project, giving in to the temptation of lighter
literature. I persisted, though, and in
the end I am glad. And I am equally glad
to finally (a year later) be finished with Conrad and Nostromo.
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