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Books Like Nostromo
What to read after Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad's Nostromo (1904) is the most ambitious of his major novels — the fictional South American republic of Costaguana, its silver mine, and the cast of characters the silver corrupts: the idealistic Charles Gould, the revolutionary Dr. Monygham, the 'incorruptible' Nostromo himself. A masterpiece of political fiction that has never received the wide readership it deserves. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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Lord Jim
by Joseph Conrad
Jim's jump from the Patna and his attempt at redemption in Patusan — the best starting point for Conrad readers and the most personal of his major novels; where Nostromo is about collective political failure, Lord Jim is about individual guilt; written four years before Nostromo, it shows Conrad's method in its most accessible form
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Heart of Darkness
by Joseph Conrad
Marlow's journey up the Congo to find Kurtz — Conrad's most famous work and the one that prefigures Nostromo most directly: where Nostromo asks what 'material interests' do to a South American republic, Heart of Darkness asks what European colonialism does to Africa and to the Europeans who conduct it; novella-length and the best introduction to Conrad's concerns
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The Secret Agent
by Joseph Conrad
Mr. Verloc, a double agent for a foreign embassy, and the Greenwich bombing — Conrad's most satirical novel, set in London; written three years after Nostromo and sharing that novel's pessimism about political idealism; the closest of Conrad's novels to a thriller and the most directly about the nature of political violence
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The Quiet American
by Graham Greene
Fowler, Pyle, and Phuong in 1950s Saigon — the twentieth-century political novel most directly in the tradition Conrad belongs to; where Nostromo asks what foreign 'material interests' do to a South American republic, The Quiet American asks what American idealism does to Vietnam; both are fundamentally pessimistic about the capacity of political idealism to avoid causing harm
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Under the Volcano
by Malcolm Lowry
Geoffrey Firmin, the British consul in Mexico, drinking himself to death on the Day of the Dead in 1938 — one of the great political novels of the twentieth century and the most direct heir to Nostromo in its use of a doomed landscape as a symbol for political catastrophe; the Spanish Civil War, the coming World War, and the consul's personal destruction are all rendered in the same tragic register
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
by Gabriel García Márquez
Seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo — the great Latin American novel that most directly responds to the tradition Nostromo belongs to; where Conrad uses Costaguana to examine what foreign capital does to a South American republic, García Márquez uses Macondo to examine what banana companies and civil wars do to Colombian history; the magical realism is alien to Conrad's method but the subject is the same
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The Autumn of the Patriarch
by Gabriel García Márquez
An unnamed Caribbean dictator, ruling for over a hundred years, in a novel of extraordinary linguistic density — the political companion to One Hundred Years of Solitude and the most direct Latin American engagement with the themes of Nostromo: power, corruption, and the long shadow that strong men cast over their nations; not for first-time García Márquez readers but essential for Nostromo fans
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Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
The Kid and the Judge in 1840s Texas and Mexico — McCarthy's darkest novel and the American work most directly in the tradition of Conrad's pessimism; where Nostromo shows capitalism corrupting a South American republic, Blood Meridian shows violence as the fundamental currency of history on the American frontier; both are novels that refuse the consolations of heroism or redemption
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