Not sure what pointed me in this direction; maybe a surfeit of detective novels. I had read this may years before (bought my copy in 1974!) and it has been televised un-memorably.
It is a big and quite difficult book, about colonialism but from a non-English perspective.
Conrad shifts time patterns slightly which makes it quite an elliptical read – a bit of plot at time A is picked up with a different character in focus at time B – so you need to work back and forwards through the plot to understand.
There are far too many South American warlords/generals with Spanish names fighting on different sides of the rather ill-defined civil war in Costaguana, and its seaport Sulaco.
It is a novel about the corruptive power of capital and wealth, typified in the silver mine and silver horde that leads to Nostromo’s destruction. It is also about the failure of love, typified in the Gould’s marriage and Nostromo’s disastrous choice of silver over the woman he wants to marry.
Pretty good.
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