The tale of a man's inability to escape his self-delusion and the tragic results that ensue, Almayer's Folly unfolds with the lush prose and keen psychological insights for which its author is renowned. 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.
Lingardova trilógia Séria
Táto trilógia vás zavedie na vzrušujúce námorné dobrodružstvá, kde sa stretávajú láska, obeta a morálne dilemy. Príbehy sú zasadené do exotických kulís a čerpajú z autentických zážitkov na mori, ktoré vtiahnu čitateľov do hlbokých ľudských vzťahov. Medzi nebezpečenstvom vodných ciest a zložitými medľudskými putami sa odvíja bohaté rozprávanie pretkávajúce romantiku s výzvami života na vlnách.
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Oxford World's Classics: An Outcast of the Islands
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The only annotated edition available, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), Conrad's second novel, is a tale of intrigue in an eastern setting. Peter Willems, a clerk in Macassar, granted a "second chance" at a remote river trading post, falls ever more hopelessly into traps set by himself and others. A parable of human frailty, with love and death the major players, this is a story of a man unable to understand others and fated never to possess his own soul.
Almayer’s Folly , Joseph Conrad’s first novel, is a tale of personal tragedy as well as a broader meditation on the evils of colonialism. Set in the lush jungle of Borneo in the late 1800s, it tells of the Dutch merchant Kaspar Almayer, whose dreams of riches for his beloved daughter, Nina, collapse under the weight of his own greed and prejudice. Nadine Gordimer writes in her Introduction, “Conrad’s writing is lifelong questioning . . . What was ‘ Almayer’s Folly ’? The pretentious house never lived in? His obsession with gold? His obsessive love for his daughter, whose progenitors, the Malay race, he despised? All three?” Conrad established in Almayer’s Folly the themes of betrayal, isolation, and colonialism that he would explore throughout the rest of his life and work.