Nostromo
Joseph Conrad · 1904
Conrad's most ambitious novel. A fictional South American republic, a silver mine, and the corruption of idealism by material interests. F.R. Leavis called it Conrad's greatest achievement. Published in 1904, its fragmented chronology and political pessimism anticipated everything the 20th century would learn about resource extraction and colonialism.
The case against
Costaguana gets a hundred pages of geography, history, and dinner parties before anything resembling a plot stirs, and the scrambled chronology means you often learn outcomes before events. Nostromo himself stays offstage for long stretches of his own novel. Conrad's grandest design, and the one most likely to be abandoned at page eighty.
Literary Fiction · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
if this one calls to you, so will these →
