Read Kamertjeszonde in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Kamertjeszonde by Herman Heijermans was first published in 1898. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 145,900 words.

Rented rooms, cheap theatres, late nights at the café — and a love that cannot end well.

Amsterdam in the 1890s. Alf, a young man of letters, lives alone in a furnished room, drifting between bouts of black melancholy and long evenings with his bohemian friends: Karel the tenor, pale Scherpenzaal, Dirk and Guus, and the faded actress Duif. They dine on smoked eel and sardines, argue about art, and count every cent.

Then, during the interval of a dreadful farce, Alf asks to be introduced to a striking young woman: Georgine Casper. She sings in cafés-chantants to support her children, while her husband, a diamond cutter, has been working in America for three years. What begins as curiosity grows into a passionate affair, lived in secret behind the doors of small rented rooms.

Herman Heijermans, author of The Good Hope, drew on his own life for this frank, vivid and often funny novel of 1898 — a bold portrait of big-city loneliness that scandalised its first readers.

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.