Dutch · Advanced
Read Van de koele meren des doods in Dutchwith every sentence explained
English title: The Deeps of Deliverance
Frederik van Eeden · 1900
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About the book
Van de koele meren des doods by Frederik van Eeden was first published in 1900. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and romance. It runs to about 105,800 words.
A sensitive girl in a grand, cold house. A hunger for beauty and love that the world cannot satisfy.
Hedwig Marga de Fontayne grows up in the middle of the nineteenth century in a stately old house in a Dutch provincial town: wealthy, well brought up and lonely. A dreamy, intensely feeling child, she lives on music, nature and fantasy, and is troubled by longings that no one around her is willing to explain.
As a young woman she marries, hoping to find the warmth she has always missed. She does not find it. Restless and unhappy, Hedwig sets out on a long and perilous search for meaning — through passion, art, illness and the grip of morphine — looking for the “cool lakes of death”, where the soul finds release.
Frederik van Eeden's The Deeps of Deliverance (1900) is a remarkably frank and compassionate portrait of a woman's inner life, far ahead of its time. It was filmed in 1982, with Renée Soutendijk as Hedwig.
- Author
- Frederik van Eeden
- First published
- 1900
- Language
- Dutch
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction, Romance
- Length
- About 105,800 words
How it opens
De geschiedenis van een vrouw. Hoe zij zocht de koele meren des Doods, waar verlossing is, en hoe zij die vond.
Haar naam heet ik Hedwig Marga de Fontayne. Een Hollandsche vrouw, maar met bloed in zich van uitheemsche voorouders.
Zij was in 't midden der negentiende eeuw geboren en opgegroeid in een Hollandsche provincie-stad, aldaar was klein vertier van handel of bedrijf, maar toch welvaart, want er woonden veel rijken in deftige huizen.
Reading Van de koele meren des doods 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.
