Almayer's Folly

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.