Dutch · Advanced
Read Quia absurdum in Dutchwith every sentence explained
Nico van Suchtelen · 1906
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About the book
Quia absurdum by Nico van Suchtelen was first published in 1906. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 76,800 words.
A white house by an Alpine lake. A friend who is gone. A young man who wanted to know everything, and to believe.
Casa Bianca, December 1904. In a white house by a mountain lake, a young scientist writes to Minka, the woman he loves, to tell her the story of their dead friend Odo. With Odo's diary and letters beside him, he goes back to the beginning.
Odo came to the university laboratory poor, shy and brilliant: a dreamer who loved Homer, Dante and Goethe and could listen to Bach and Beethoven for hours. One summer at Casa Bianca brought him friendship, music and Minka. Then, hungry for truth and for God, he joined Harmonie, an idealistic mountain colony with its own prophet, to dig, chop wood and find a new way to live.
Told in letters and diary pages, Quia Absurdum (1906), named after the saying “I believe because it is absurd”, was Nico van Suchtelen's passionate breakthrough bestseller about love, doubt and the search for meaning.
- Author
- Nico van Suchtelen
- First published
- 1906
- Language
- Dutch
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 76,800 words
How it opens
Casa Bianca, 12 December 1904. Minka, dezen morgen was de wereld schooner dan ik haar ooit zag en het leven in haar duizend wonderen heerlijker dan ik ooit droomde. En toch dacht ik niet aan jou, liefste, en toch was ik niet gelukkig. Welk een leeg woord is geluk voor een stemming die zooveel onzeggelijke aandoeningen omsluit als dit wonderbare gevoel van éen zijn met alle werkelijkheid! Voor dit blij verbaasde besef als een kindje te zijn dat een ongekend getoover van uit zijn wiegje aanstaart!
Reading Quia absurdum 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.
