JOSEPH CONRAD'S "NOSTROMO"

JOSEPH CONRAD'S NOSTROMO

"The greatest novel in English of this century." So wrote someone named Walter Allen of Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo.

I had never heard of the book although I think Nostromo was the name of the spaceship in the movie Alien, the one in which Sigourney Weaver gets into her spacesuit dressed in very small panties.

Oh yes, so I bought the book based on that blurb by the immortal Mr. Allen. That's pretty high praise considering that the twentieth century produced such as Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, et al.

But query: what exactly does that mean for a book published in 1904? I assume that Mr. Allen wrote that sometime significantly after ought-four but it would be startling if he really did mean that the work eclipsed Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury, A Farewell to Arms, etc.

On the other hand, if Allen wrote that tribute say, in 1915, that is almost damning by faint praise like what I used to say to a "between jobs" friend of mine that he was "one of the ten best unemployed filmmakers in all of Poughkeepsie."

Allen didn't say of the century, which could thus include most of the nineteenth, he said of this century so it had to be the twentieth. Very odd, very oddly ambiguous.

It's a fine book so far as I can tell after eighty pages but "the greatest novel in English of this [the 20th] century"????? Maybe this is why I had never heard of Walter Allen.

Hey, if you run your VCR in reverse you can make it look like Sigourney Weaver is getting undressed. Huh, how about that?

-Benjamin Harris