The Malay Sacrilege

December 1936. Maille, a young French engineer recently recruited, arrives at a vast rubber plantation in Malaya managed by an all-powerful company. There, he discovers the heat, the jungle, the Tamil tappers at work, and above all, the absurdity of a system obsessed with yield and methodology, where rationalization ends up amounting to nothing.

The Malay Sacrilege is Pierre Boulle's second novel, published in 1951, one year before The Bridge over the River Kwai and twelve years before Planet of the Apes. Boulle himself had been a planter in Malaya starting in 1936: he knew this world from the inside and turned it into a funny, stinging satire of the colonial enterprise and the machinery of production. One can already see all the elements that would become his strengths: irony, a taste for the absurd, and a perspective focused on those who suffer under the system.

Long overshadowed by the global successes that followed, this early novel deserved to be returned to its readers.

• Authors : Pierre Boulle
• Dimensions : 190 x 125 mm
• Number of pages : 240