Nostromo

The Penguin Project: Nostromo by Joseph Conrad

If you’re new to my Substack - a quick explainer - when my father died I found a load of my mother’s old Penguins stashed in a cupboard. So I’m reading every single one of them.

Apologies for the gap since the last Penguin Project. I had to read a brick of a book for the Bunker pod which I occasionally host - so other reading had to be set to one side. But here we are, back with another semi brick, a book that is widely regarded as one of the finest novels of the 20th Century.

Written in 1904, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (to give it its full title) was inspired by the author’s experience serving on a ship in the Gulf of Mexico where he overheard the story of a man who had singlehandedly managed to steal an entire ship worth of silver. In a moment of serendipity, twenty five years later, he found himself in a bookshop where he picked up a travelogue only to discover that the author had worked on a schooner and that the master of that schooner was the very thief who had stolen the silver. And so Nostromo was born.

It’s set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana and, after a lengthy first section that sets up the port town of Sulaco, some rebellion rumblings, a refurbished silver mine and it’s owner Charles Gould, we finally get to meet our titular hero Nostromo.

As you’d expect, he’s a strapping lad and is tasked with saving a huge amount of silver from the grabby hands of marauding revolutionaries. To do so he has to, (you’ve guessed it), take it offshore in a boat. Of course, nothing runs smoothly: the boat is hit at night by a Revolutionary transport but Nostromo and his trusty sidekick, a young journalist called Martin, manage to put the ship ashore on the island of Great Isabel where they deposit the silver and scuttle the boat. Nostromo then manages, like the epic He Man he is, to swim back to Sulaco. He leaves Martin behind on the island who promptly goes mad and shoots himself.

Meanwhile, with the revolution in full flow, Nostromo starts to feel a little jaded and as is is often the way with anyone who has had just about enough of this shit, the previously incorruptible Nostromo turns to the dark side. Travelling back to the island of Great Isabel, he recovers (steals) the silver, ingot by ingot, but everything goes tits up when a lighthouse is built, making it near impossible for him to carry on thieving and one night, he’s mistaken for a trespasser and is shot. The end.

Joseph Conrad was a Polish-British writer who didn’t speak English fluently until into his twenties. Born in Poland, he was an only child to Apollo and Ewa. His father was a political activist and spent much of his time resisting the Russian Empire. This got him into various scrapes and the family were exiled to Vologda, famed for its harsh climate. His sentence was commuted and the family moved to Ukraine but sadly, the better climate was not enough to save Ewa who died of tuberculosis.

In 1869. they moved to Krakow but Apollo also fell foul of tuberculosis and Conrad was orphaned at the age of eleven. Packed off to live with his uncle he was nothing but bother so at the age of 16 he packed his bags and became a sailor in Marseilles where he became firm friends with a Corsican merchant seaman called Dominique Cervoni, who would later become the inspiration for Nostromo. He worked as a sailor until he was 36 but abandoned the sea due to a combination of poor health and an unavailability of ships but the primary reason was that he had become fascinated with writing. His first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was published in 1895 and established him as a teller of romantic and exotic tales, a pigeonhole he was never quite able to shake off. Most of his work, however, appeared in newspapers and magazines and he spent most of his working life requesting advances so he could scrape by. Success finally came knocking in 1913 following the publication of Chance, which ironically, is considered one of his worst novels.

He suffered from gout, depression and neuralgia. He had recurring bouts of malaria. He had a phobia of dysentery and failed to look after his teeth. He attempted suicide when he was 20: he shot himself in the chest but miraculously survived.

He married a working class English woman, Jessie George, in 1896 which was frowned upon by all and sundry but she made him happy so to hell with the lot of them. She would go on to write a cookbook. They had two children. They moved often: every time Conrad had a depressive episode he would move house in an attempt to regenerate himself. He died in 1924, probably of a heart attack, and is buried in Canterbury.

He is considered to be one of the greatest prose poets.

The book was adapted in 1926 as the silent film The Silver Treasure and starred George O Brien. In 1991, David Lean was set to film Nostromo with Steven Spielberg producing but died weeks before principle photography was set to begin. The project withered away. Marlon Brando, Peter O Toole and Isabella Rossellini were set to star so why someone else didn’t take the reins, we will never know.

The spacecraft in Ridley Scott’s Alien is called the Nostromo. It’s also the name of the dark and corrupt city world in Warhammer 40,000.