Book Review - THE DAWN WATCH Joseph Conrad in a Global World By Maya Jasanoff

I turned my back on reading Joseph Conrad in 1967. This was also the year that I published “A Grain of Wheat,” my third novel, which I wrote soon after reading Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes.” 

I could not put words to what repelled me, because, despite the unease, his influence on my work was unmistakable, and long lasting. 

“A Grain of Wheat” marked a dramatic shift for me away from the linear plots and single points of view of my first two novels to the multiple narrative voices and diverse temporal and geographic spaces of my later works. The difference in style was a result of my encounter with Conrad.

The majesty and musicality of his well-structured sentences had so thrilled me as a young writer that I could cure a bout of writer’s block simply by listening to the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or reading the opening pages of Conrad’s “Nostromo.” It instantly brought my mojo back.

I am not alone in being so impacted. In Gabriel García Márquez’s “Hundred Years of Solitude,” the sweep of history and dictatorships that litter the social landscape of the novel reminded me strongly of “Nostromo,” Conrad’s complex epic about an imaginary South American republic. 

García Márquez’s title even seems to nod at the fictional historical tome contained within Conrad’s novel: “Fifty Years of Misrule.”

In her fascinating book, “The Dawn Watch,” the Harvard professor Maya Jasanoff offers detailed background on the evolution of Conrad’s books, describing how each was a sort of reckoning with Western conquest and advancing globalization. 

We learn, for example, that “Nostromo” was written as Conrad delved into the oral and written sources about the “liberation” of Latin America that often ended in Western-backed dictatorship. 

As he was writing, he was taking in news of the crisis over the Panama Canal, an episode of political and military manipulation in which America emerged as a new, wily imperial power. 

In other words, Conrad and García Márquez were drawing from the same well of post-colonial Latin American history.

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Original review on: www.nytimes.com