Dutch · Advanced
Read Willem Mertens' levensspiegel in Dutchwith every sentence explained
English title: Willem Mertens' Mirror of Life
J. van Oudshoorn · 1914
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About the book
Willem Mertens' levensspiegel by J. van Oudshoorn was first published in 1914. In Passage you read the full text in the original Dutch, marked advanced and filed under historical fiction. It runs to about 39,800 words.
A man looks in the mirror and sees a stranger.
Willem Mertens is a shabby, lonely bank clerk in a small Dutch town. Once he was a cherished boy full of promise; now, after a breakdown and a stay in an institution that nobody mentions, he drifts from café to café, afraid of his empty room, borrowing a few guilders from a friend's sister for one more night out.
His last tie to the rest of humanity is Helene, a waitress in a back-street tavern called the Trocadero. For her he lies, pleads, drinks — and dips into the bank's cash box. As the pressure mounts, the story reaches back to the roots of his guilt and loneliness, in a childhood haunted by a secret sin.
J. van Oudshoorn's Willem Mertens' Mirror of Life (1914) is a strange, piercing psychological novel, a cult classic once named among the “unjustly forgotten” masterpieces of Dutch literature.
- Author
- J. van Oudshoorn
- First published
- 1914
- Language
- Dutch
- Level
- Advanced
- Genre
- Historical Fiction
- Length
- About 39,800 words
How it opens
Hij draalde aan de glazen-als-winkeldeur. De winkel zelf was opzij en in het pas geschrobde marmeren voorportaaltje met den vermanenden voetveeg, was aan een blank gepoetste kraan vooral het behoedzame koperen emmertje van eene afschrikkende degelijkheid. Maar achter in de lange half-donkere gang lokte een kier huiskamerlicht, ook waarde een schaduw aan en beschaamd zoo besluiteloos betrapt te worden, opende hij de deur. De dochter, die hem al herkend had, liep terug, hem beduidend de huiskamer in te gaan. Hij klopte, trad naar binnen en trof niemand aan.
Reading Willem Mertens' levensspiegel 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.
