A review by chalicotherex
Tropic Moon by Georges Simenon

5.0

Fever dream colonialism. Completely malarial. Better than Joseph Conrad and all your Apocalypse Nows. Even better than Fitzcarraldo (I always found the backstory better than the movie: Kinski shooting into the tent, the Peruvian natives offering to kill Kinski, Herzog not realizing they disassembled the boat before dragging it over the mountain). The intro compares it to Dr. Destouches's writings about Africa in Journey to the End of the Night, and yeah, I'd say that's about where it belongs in the pantheon. Brutal, and perhaps portentous.

From the introduction:

An aspect of empire that Simenon captures well is the ethical blankness, the cloud of unknowing, it seems to engender in the psyches of the imperializers, at all levels. The characters in Tropic Moon may experience odd moments of vague disquiet that interrupt the peculiar emotional equilibrium that reigns while dark deeds are routinely transpiring, but deep recognition of what is truly happening is rare, and when it occurs, costly.

If novels could give you dengue fever, this one would.