There always are pushers and those who are pushed… “Viva Costaguana!” he shrieked, with intense self-assertion, and, instantly ruffling up his feathers, assumed an air of puffed-up somnolence behind the glittering wires. The parrot, catching the sound of a word belonging to his vocabulary, was moved to interfere. The events take place in the South American country of Costaguana, which is being torn with greed, political ambitions, poverty and revolutions… Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Joseph Conrad, who knew the human nature inside out, telling the story of Nostromo and portraying his personages is ironic and even slightly derisive…Įvery man, somewhere deep inside, has his own share of rascality… And every human doing has two sides…Īction is consolatory. He has been lauded as one of the most powerful, insightful, and disturbing novelists in the English canon despite coming to English later in life, which allowed him to combine it with the sensibilities of French, Russian, and Polish literature. This was useful when, because a need to come to terms with his experience, lead him to write Heart of Darkness, in 1899, which was followed by other fictionalized explorations of his life. He was deeply interested in a small number of writers both in French and English whose work he studied carefully. Joseph Conrad settled in England in 1894, the year before he published his first novel.

He was hired to take a steamship into Africa, and according to Conrad, the experience of seeing firsthand the horrors of colonial rule left him a changed man. He was made a Master Mariner, and served more than sixteen years before an event inspired him to try his hand at writing. He then began to work aboard British ships, learning English from his shipmates. He joined the French Merchant Marine and briefly employed himself as a wartime gunrunner. Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) was a Polish-born English novelist who today is most famous for Heart of Darkness, his fictionalized account of Colonial Africa.Ĭonrad left his native Poland in his middle teens to avoid conscription into the Russian Army.

Nostromo 1904