Lord Jim still is my favorite but this book (though his first) was far better than Heart of Darkness or Victory. ( )

The thing is that neither Almayer, his daughter, Nina, or his wife fit in. Neither does his would-be partner, Dain. Everyone lacks connection in this short novel. But none more than Almayer himself. He is a misfit in the most literal sense of the word. Uncomfortable with the natives, his family, or his sponsor, he lives his life adrift. As the novel puts it when describing the building of his new house on the first page, the decay has set in even as it is being built. And Almayer all but rushes to that eventual fate, while those around him disintegrate and disappear from the text and our consciousness. ( )

Of the Conrad Novels I have read, this one left the weakest impression on me. This study of the divergence of all the parties to an unhappy marriage is very careful work, but the twenty-year old me was not all that impressed. Perhaps the sixty-year old would now find this novel more engaging. It certainly was not a trip to the south seas of adventure. ( )

"Almayer's Folly" was Conrad's first novel, set in a remote Bornean outpost at the end of the last century. Conrad draws on his own experience to present the strains of life at a cultural crossroads. The Dutch trader, Almayer, is stranded in Sambir, 30 miles up a virtually unknown equatorial river. He lives among old and new cultures; his wife is Sulu (Filipino), behind him live his Arab rivals, across the river is the Malay rajah's campong, inland are the primitive Dyak head-hunters, and decisions taken in London and Amsterdam affect every household in the settlement. In its social density and variety the novel prefigures Conrad's later masterpieces "Nostromo" and "The Secret Agent". This is a critical edition of "Almayer's Folly", with an introduction which demonstrates the novel's importance as an exploration of colonialism, and shows that in this early work Conrad had already elaborated the fictional technique and conception of human life than served to make him a key figure in the evolution and achievement of literary modernism.

The language that describes landscapes is dense and rich; the themes of alienation in the externally and inwardly destructive colonial psyche are ripe for further analysis. Perhaps, if I cared enough, I would be interested to note Conrad's Polish heritage and the obsession with Englishness that Almayer has in this book. Conrad is cynical about Almayer (who is Dutch) and the English, but he cannot imagine his Malay characters as anything but savages. Every so often when it feels like he might be able to get past that, he appears to run into a wall--like a conceptual block--and the narrative pulls back to describe how a Malay character was behaving in a way that was typical to his or her race; that is, in a "savage", remote and inscrutable manner. For all the beauty of the language in certain parts of this slim novel, and the complexity of the ideas submerged in the straightforward narrative, the book is ultimately tedious, small-minded, and mean-spirited. This is because of Conrad's orientalism, which despite his talent and skill in crafting a sentence, renders him without imagination. A novel cannot succeed on repetitions of stereotypes. ( )