Almayer’s Folly

Almayer’s Folly was one of Conrad’s earliest attempts to write in English, his adopted language. In the story of Almayer, a Dutch trader living in the Malaysian jungles with his native wife and daughter, Conrad first employed the themes and setting that characterized much of his later fiction.

The conflict of Western and Oriental cultures, the power of nature, and the effects of cowardice and racism are all essential aspects of this troubling story. And in Almayer Conrad created one of his most memorable doomed heroes.

“The history of a European married to a Malayan wife who reverts to her ancestral savagery. He lives a miserable life among the fierce Malays and Dyaks of Borneo, and the tragedy culminates when his beloved daughter forsakes him to marry a savage. The awful effect on the mental and moral nature of the solitude and the contact with savagery is brought out with intense imaginative skill.”— Baker’s Best