Read Het boek van Siman den Javaan in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Het boek van Siman den Javaan by E.F.E. Douwes Dekker was first published in 1908. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 91,800 words.

Dry rice fields, rising taxes, a greedy official. A Javanese family sets out for a better life.

In the Preanger highlands of West Java, old Pah Rekso smokes in silence outside his poor hut in Tjidamar, beside his twenty-year-old son Siman. Once the village was prosperous; now the water no longer reaches the rice fields, his wife's last jewel has gone to the pawnshop, and the local official has his eye on their land.

So the family sells up and treks north for days with a buffalo cart, together with their hot-headed neighbour Pah Ran and his daughter Djiah — Siman's sweetheart. On a vast private estate they start again, and Siman marries Djiah to the sound of the gamelan. But here too, rice is weighed against profit.

Subtitled “a novel of rice, dividend and humanity”, The Book of Siman the Javanese (1908) is a fierce, compassionate protest novel by Ernest Douwes Dekker — grand-nephew of Multatuli and later, as Setiabudi, a national hero of Indonesia.

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.