Synopsis Conrad's second novel (1896) is set at an isolated trading post in the town of Macassar, on an island in Indonesia, where a fairly lowly Dutch clerk named Peter Willems finds himself lost and bewildered in an alien world. As he tries to find a way to survive there, his own intrigues prove to be his undoing, and in the end he essentially loses his soul. As Conrad writes in his introduction to the novel, "The man who suggested Willems to me was not particularly interesting in himself. My interest was aroused by his dependent position, his strange, dubious status of a mistrusted, disliked, worn-out European living on the reluctant toleration of that Settlement hidden in the heart of the forest-land, up that sombre stream which our ship was the only white men's ship to visit."
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2002-09-01 |
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