Almayer's Folly
SynopsisPlot
Set in nineteenth-century Borneo, the novel recounts the brief rise and protracted fall of Kaspar Almayer, a Dutch merchant who has struggled for 25 years to practice his trade in the jungle. Only his daughter, Nina, brightens Almayer's embittered marriage to a Malayan, and he dreams of their triumphant return to civilization — a fantasy undermined by Almayer's own greed and prejudice. This tale of personal tragedy offers a wider perspective on the disastrous effects of colonialism, a view familiar to the author from the worldly wealth of experience he acquired in fifteen years of service as a merchant seaman. Conrad infused his first novel with many of the themes and settings that he would return to again and again in his later fiction: the clash of Western and Eastern cultures, the sovereignty of the natural world, and the consequences of cowardice and racism. A gripping and thought-provoking chronicle, Almayer's Folly abounds in the page-turning excitement that won Conrad his place among the greatest storytellers in English literature.
Story
About this book
Almayer's Folly, published in 1895, was Joseph Conrad's first novel. It is set in nineteenth-century Borneo and follows Kaspar Almayer, a Dutch trader who has spent twenty-five years trying to build a commercial life in the tropical interior. His marriage to a Malayan woman has grown bitter, and his only source of hope is his daughter, Nina. Almayer clings to a vision of returning with her to European society, imagining wealth and respectability waiting for them elsewhere.
The story traces the slow collapse of that vision. Almayer's own greed and racial prejudice work against him as steadily as the forest and river around him. Nina, caught between her father's European ambitions and her mother's world, becomes a figure at the center of these competing pressures. Conrad draws on his own years as a merchant seaman to ground the novel in specific physical detail, and the tensions between Western commercial ambition and local life on Borneo run through every chapter.
Conrad returned to many of the concerns raised here, including the collision of cultures and the consequences of self-deception, in his later and better-known works. The Borneo setting gives the novel a geographic weight that separates it from the drawing-room fiction of the same period.
