Dutch · Advanced
Read De stille kracht in Dutchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Hidden Force
Louis Couperus · 1900
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About the book
De stille kracht by Louis Couperus was first published in 1900. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction, horror and thriller and suspense. It runs to about 71,700 words.
Java, around 1900. A blood-red moon, whispers in the dark and a power no Dutchman can control.
Otto van Oudijck is the Resident of Labuwangi, a district in eastern Java: a hard-working, honest colonial official who believes in order, duty and common sense. He has little patience for the old Javanese ruling family, whose pride he wounds without even noticing — and none at all for talk of magic.
His beautiful young wife Léonie drifts through the heat in a haze of idleness and secret affairs; the grown children of his first marriage are restless and resentful. Then strange things begin to happen in the Residency. Stones fly through the night, a woman's bath turns red, and a figure in white is glimpsed among the trees. Something silent and ancient is stirring.
The Hidden Force (1900) is Louis Couperus' haunting masterpiece about colonial pride and the mystery of the East. It was adapted for television in 1974 and for the cinema in 2024.
- Author
- Louis Couperus
- First published
- 1900
- Language
- Dutch
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Horror, Thriller and Suspense
- Length
- About 71,700 words
How it opens
De volle maan, tragisch dien avond, was reeds vroeg, nog in den laatsten dagschemer opgerezen als een immense, bloedroze bol, vlamde als een zonsondergang laag achter de tamarindeboomen der Lange Laan en steeg, langzaam zich louterende van hare tragische tint, in een vagen hemel op. Een doodsche stilte spande alom als een sluier van zwijgen, of, na de lange middagsiësta, de avondrust zonder overgang van leven begon. Over de stad, wier wit gepilaarde villa-huizen laag wegscholen in het geboomte der lanen en tuinen, hing een donzende geluideloosheid, in de windstille benauwdheid der avondlucht, als was de matte avond moê van den zonneblakenden dag der Oostmoesson.
Reading De stille kracht in Passage
Passage sets the book as a quiet, paginated reader in Dutch. Read at your own pace, and when a sentence stops you, tap it. You get:
- a natural translation of that exact sentence,
- a short note on the grammar, in plain words,
- the key words, which you can save with the sentence they came from,
- all of it in English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Turkish or Portuguese, whichever you read best.
It's marked advanced, with richer vocabulary and longer sentences. If it feels heavy, start with an intermediate Dutch book and come back to it. The words you save come back later in short review games, so the book keeps teaching after you close it.
