God's fool

At nine years old, Elias Lossell loses both sight and hearing in a terrible accident, and his mind stops growing with him. Decades later, he inherits the largest tea merchant house in the Dutch town of Koopstad, making him fabulously wealthy while his twin half-brothers Hendrik and Hubert do every actual day of work. Hendrik seethes with resentment. He loves money more than anything, and his ambitious, extravagant wife pushes him to seize control of the firm by any means necessary. What follows is a ruthlessly funny dissection of a society that worships wealth while pretending to worship virtue. Maartens, writing in 1892, constructs a poisonous portrait of a town where everything and everyone has a price. The satire is sharp, the social observations cutting, and the family drama genuinely dark. This is a novel about what money does to people who have it, to those who want it, and to the strange innocent at the center of it all, the "fool" whose disability makes him both pitiable and useful to everyone around him.