I've Just Read...

Nostromo by Joseph Conrad. Or, to be more precise, listened to the audiobook version, superbly read by Nigel Anthony. 

Are people still reading Conrad? I have a feeling that people start with Heart of Darkness, and then finish there, because it's a strangely disappointing book. The best scene is the framing episode at the beginning, on the Thames. Well, Nostromo is a far more successful attempt at the same subject, which is, partly at least, the failure of our liberal ambitions in the chaotic world of human reality.

Robert Hughes once praised Auden for achieving 'what all writers envy: a prophecy that came true.' Conrad achieved this three times. In The Secret Agent he anticipated the nihilistic urban terrorism of the 20th and 21st century. In Under Western Eyes he portrayed the nihilists who were going to end up running totalitarian states. 

And in Nostromo he uncannily captures the violent disasters of European and US involvement in the developing world. Costaguana is an imaginary South American country but it could be Libya, it could be Zimbabwe, it could be Cuba. It's more than that as well. It's as if a Kipling story were rewritten by Nietzsche. The leading characters are plagued not just by political problems but by existential problems about the nature of their own selves once their social roles are stripped away. It's a novel full of Mr Kurtz's, always on the verge of seeing the essential nothingness of existence.

It's also a dazzling piece of narrative which reminds me of Jean-Luc Godard's dictum that every story should have a beginning, a middle and an end - but not necessarily in that order.

It's my new favourite book.