NOSTROMO

British narrator Nigel Anthony faces several challenges in his reading of Conrad's 1904 novel. The text is dense, and Anthony's slow pacing does little to move it along. However, he succeeds wonderfully in overcoming the second obstacle, which is the linguistic variety among the characters: the titular hero is an Italian, one of the principal families in the story is English, and the setting of the novel is a fictional South American country where the native tongue is Spanish. Anthony affects accents for each of these nationalities, and he’s remarkably convincing, switching between them with ease. Conrad was not known for his vivid characterizations, but Anthony gives this novel's cast a new dimension with his voicings. D.B. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine [Published: FEBRUARY 2009]