Dutch · Advanced
Read Eva in Dutchwith every sentence explained
Carry van Bruggen · 1927
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About the book
Eva by Carry van Bruggen was first published in 1927. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 68,100 words.
New Year's Day, 1900. Snow on the harbour, and a young woman listening to her own heart.
On the very first day of the new century, Eva walks through the snowy streets of her small harbour town beside David, her friend since earliest childhood. His future is shooting up like a rocket; hers feels as blurred as frosted glass. Eva is clever, sensitive and hungry for life — but she is also a young Jewish woman in a world with strict ideas about what a girl may want.
She becomes a teacher in the city, travelling there daily by train, and there she discovers friendship, independence and desire. The novel follows her not from the outside but from within: her thoughts, memories and secret longings flow across the page as they come.
Carry van Bruggen's Eva (1927) is a landmark of Dutch modernism: a bold, poetic portrait of a woman's search for herself, and one of the most daring novels of its day.
- Author
- Carry van Bruggen
- First published
- 1927
- Language
- Dutch
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 68,100 words
How it opens
Gisteravond laat al hing hij boven de daken klaar, de rosse lantaarns sloegen er hun gloed tegen aan en vannacht heeft hij zich laten zakken -, de sneeuw. Het is de eerste sneeuw van het nieuwe jaar, het is de eerste sneeuw van de nieuwe eeuw -, sneeuw die de wereld vernieuwt. Het is vandaag de Nieuwe Eeuw -, gister liep de Oude Eeuw ten einde. Honderd jaren waren om. Een bolgeblazen ballon, waaruit het stroomde, stroomde -, eindelijk leeg. Een oude afgewonden ketting, honderd jaar geleden nieuw.
Reading Eva 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.
