Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River (Everyman's Library) - Tapa blanda

Almayer's Folly (1895) was Conrad's first novel in the English language. Fascinated with the sea, Conrad joined his first ship in 1874. He began writing about 1886 and brought to it a good knowledge of many peoples and a profound feeling of the contrast between the tightly enclosed communities of ships' crewsand the close egocentric individualism characterizing land societies. In this preoccupation with the exploration of moral issues he was in the English tradition, but brought to the English novel an admiration for the French realists. Almayer's Folly is set in the far East and tells the story of Conrad's first 'isolated man': his domestic, social and political defeat.

Conrad's first novel is also the first part of his Malayan trilogy. Set in Borneo against an exotic and ruinous background, the book enacts the final, tragi-comic "anguish of paternity" of the trader Almayer, the colonialist idealist-dreamer and Conrad's first "isolated man". As the husband of a Filippino woman and the father of a half-caste daughter, Almayer witnesses his dreams of wealth, conquest and escape being defeated by domestic, social and political schism. The text is here accompanied by an introduction, notes, selected criticism, text summary and a chronology of Conrad's life and times.