Almayer's Folly (version 2)

Kaspar Almayer built a house too grand for his means, a white elephant on the Malaysian coast meant to announce his arrival among the great traders of the East. But the gold mines never materializes, and the house becomes instead a monument to his delusions, the Folly. Conrad's first novel is a pitiless study of a man destroyed by fantasy: a Dutchman who married a Malayan woman for profit, who dreams of returning to Europe wealthy beyond measure, and who finds himself instead stranded between two worlds, trusted by neither. His daughter Nina, caught between her mother's people and her father's vanishing European identity, finds escape in the arms of Dain Maroola, a Malay prince with secrets of his own. What unfolds is a tragedy of racial displacement and ruined dreams, a book that announces Conrad's lifelong obsession with the violence Europeans do to themselves in their encounters with the East. It is Conrad at his most bitter, most precise, and most darkly ironic.