Dutch · Advanced
Read Max Havelaar in Dutchwith every sentence explained
Multatuli · 1860
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About the book
Max Havelaar by Multatuli was first published in 1860. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 123,200 words.
A coffee broker with no imagination. A bundle of manuscripts. A cry against injustice that shook an empire.
Batavus Droogstoppel, a smug Amsterdam coffee broker, believes in two things only: profit and the Truth (his own). When a shabby old schoolfellow leaves him a parcel of papers, he decides to turn them into a book — and out of them steps Max Havelaar, a passionate young official posted in 1856 to Lebak, in western Java.
Havelaar discovers that the Javanese villagers are being robbed of their buffaloes, their rice and their labour by the local chiefs, while the colonial government looks away. He swears to stop it, whatever it costs him. Between the comic chapters and the furious ones lies the heartbreaking tale of Saïdjah and Adinda.
Published under the pen name Multatuli (“I have suffered much”), Max Havelaar (1860) is the most famous Dutch novel ever written: bold, funny and angry, it changed how Europe saw its colonies — and the fair-trade label still carries its hero's name.
- Author
- Multatuli
- First published
- 1860
- Language
- Dutch
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 123,200 words
How it opens
Ik ben makelaar in koffi, en woon op de Lauriergracht, N° 37. Het is myn gewoonte niet, romans te schryven, of zulke dingen, en het heeft dan ook lang geduurd, voor ik er toe overging een paar riem papier extra te bestellen, en het werk aantevangen, dat gy, lieve lezer, zoo-even in de hand hebt genomen, en dat ge lezen moet als ge makelaar in koffi zyt, of als ge wat anders zyt. Niet alleen dat ik nooit iets schreef wat naar een roman geleek, maar ik houd er zelfs niet van, iets dergelyks te lezen, omdat ik een man van zaken ben.
Reading Max Havelaar 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.
