Read Van oude menschen, de dingen, die voorbij gaan... in Dutchwith every sentence explained

Van oude menschen, de dingen, die voorbij gaan... by Louis Couperus was first published in 1906. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction and mystery and crime. It runs to about 83,600 words.

Two very old people. One terrible secret. Sixty years of silence.

In a quiet house in The Hague, Grandmama, nearly a hundred years old, sits at her window and waits. Every day old Mr Takma, almost as old, comes to visit her. But the two of them share something no one must ever know: one night, sixty years ago in the Indies, a man died — and they were there.

Around them, children and grandchildren live their own tangled lives: gentle, anxious Lot, just married to the young Elly; his stormy mother Ottilie and her patient husband Steyn; uncles, aunts and cousins scattered between Holland, Nice and Java. Slowly, through rumours, old servants and half-heard words, the past creeps closer, and the younger ones begin to wonder.

Old People and the Things That Pass (1906) is one of Louis Couperus' greatest novels: a story of time, memory and guilt, as quiet as a ticking clock and as gripping as a detective story.

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.