A return after a busy holiday sabbatical! I’ll confess to having finished Nostromo nearly a week back now, Donald, so perhaps at this point it would make most sense for me to move backwards and hopefully meet you somewhere in the middle of Sulaco. There are a few particular passages and one episode I’d like to hear you address – the torture scene of Hirsch – but for now I’d like to register my final, larger impressions. To be frank, the novel simply didn’t work for me as a sheer matter of pacing. The first four hundred or so pages of my edition laboriously sets up a physical world, character relations, and an unresolved scenario, only to rush through – however professionally via Captain Mitchell’s cinematic flashback – the final pages to a tidy dénouement with little to do, really, with the people or circumstances of before. It would be presumptuous to claim that Conrad lost control of the material; yet as a reader, I felt an overarching fear on his part towards the end. Couldn’t this project in its time-span prove interminable? How long – that is, precisely how many pages – would he need recording the corrosive effects his later career upon Nostromo, or to maintain the same psychological pitch and sensual intensity for so large a cast as before? The novel holds the prospect, I think, of running to a thousand pages or more. From what I’ve read elsewhere, as it stands Nostromo took Conrad three years of tooth-pulling. And so it feels to me there’s an understandable failure of nerve concluding the book. (On a more precise note, this may have prompted the future-tense, narrative interjections scattered about previously – i.e. Sulaco’s eventual success as a republic itself – though I don’t think they simply pave the way for the end. I’d like to know how these effected your reading, Donald.) So to conclude myself, this was an interesting book if not a satisfying one for reasons I’ll address soon.
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