The only fixed point is a silver mine operated by a British man by the name of Charles Gould, and its riches are a constant temptation for each new dictator. The story takes place in the fictitious nation of Costaguana, loosely based on Colombia, an unstable place of political chaos stuck in a hopeless cycle of revolutions and counter-revolutions, where the new government's outrage over the former's unscrupulousness almost immediately turns into massive corruption at the change of power. Not because of the story, but because it's so very wordy. In Nostromo, there is an abundance of characters, which makes the novel seem difficult to read. In these, there are individuals who carry the past within themselves and act accordingly. In his two previous books, Lord Jim (1901) and Heart of Darkness, Conrad had gradually explored western imperialism and the man that is a product thereof. Nostromo is not only the name of the ill-fated space ship in Ridley Scott's Alien (no coincidence), but also Conrad's protagonist in this novel, an Italian man's man who left his homeland to seek the fortune in America. It's also far more ambitious than Heart of Darkness, with its nearly 600 pages. However, the book that is often emphasized as Conrad's magnum opus is Nostromo, published in 1904. He's perhaps best known for his novel Heart of Darkness (1902), which inspired Francis Ford Coppola to make the film Apocalypse Now.

This summer I finally took on the daunting task to read the classic and thick-as-a-brick novel Nostromo by the Polish-British writer Joseph Conrad.

Nostromo by joseph conrad