Word: nostromo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...furnish the stage on which his strange cast converge, Stone takes his cue from Joseph Conrad, who set Nostromo in an imaginary South American republic called Costa-guana. Stone squeezes Tecan and its more progressive neighbor Compostela into a fictional space between Nicaragua and Costa Rica, and then provides topography and politics. The land here is racked periodically by earthquakes; when Holliwell arrives in Tecan, he senses the tremors of revolution as well. The local dictator, propped up by U.S. support and sadistic National Guardsmen wearing reflecting sunglasses, may have finally pushed his brutalized subjects too far. He is driving...
...novelist, who saw himself as "Pole, Catholic and Gentleman," left his native country at age 16. Between then and the age of 40, he voyaged all over the world, soaking up South American background for stories like Nostromo and Caspar Ruiz, working on sailing ships, where his experiences served as the basis for The Nigger of the Narcissus. He joined a steamship expedition up the Congo, which became the setting for Heart of Darkness. The circumstances of his life would seem to require little exaggeration, but Conrad loved to romanticize everything, including himself. As Tennant shows, he probably never...
...here's a novel that functions both as serious art and as a compelling adventure story, and manages to pull it off with a lot of style. In Port Tropique Barry Gifford does what Hemingway did in To Have and Have Not and what Conrad did in Nostromo--he conveys a gripping story line and a distinctive aesthetic. With all the control of the masters, the 34-year-old Gifford has produced an intriguing literary experiment in the guise of a page-turnes complete with palm trees, speedboats and revolutionaries...
...dialogue. Her writing is spirited but there are grounds for disagreement, such as her contention that the fiction of Conrad "went so far in' the direction of brevity and concentration that they were closer to the tale than the novel." A rather curious assertion in the light of Nostromo's 400 pages and Lord...