Max Havelaar

A fierce indictment of colonialism, Max Havelaar is a masterpiece of Dutch literature based on the author’s own experience as an adminstrator in the Dutch East Indies in the 1850s.

A fierce indictment of colonialism, Max Havelaar is a masterpiece of Dutch literature based on the author’s own experience as an adminstrator in the Dutch East Indies in the 1850s.

A brilliantly inventive fiction that is also a work of burning political outrage, Max Havelaar tells the story of a renegade Dutch colonial administrator’s ultimately unavailing struggle to end the exploitation of the Indonesian peasantry. Havelaar’s impassioned expose is framed by the fatuous reflections of an Amsterdam coffee trader, Drystubble, into whose hands it has fallen. Thus a tale of the jungles and villages of Indonesia is interknit with one of the houses and warehouses of bourgeois Amsterdam where the tidy profits from faraway brutality not only accrue but are counted as a sign of God’s grace.

Multatuli (meaning “I have suffered greatly”) was the pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker, and his novel caused a political storm when it came out in Holland. Max Havelaar, however, is as notable for its art as it is for its politics. Layering not only different stories but different ways of writing-including plays, poems, lists, letters, and a wild accumulation of notes-to furious, hilarious, and disconcerting effect, this masterpiece of Dutch literature confronts the fixities of power with the protean and subversive energy of the imagination.

Author Biography

Multatuli (1820-1887), born Eduard Douwes Dekker in Amsterdam, was one of the Netherlands’ greatest writers. He traveled to the Dutch East Indies in 1838, and had a number of government jobs until resigning from his position as assistant commissioner of Lebak, Java, in 1856, when his efforts to protect the Javanese people from their own chiefs were not supported by the colonial government. Upon returning to Europe, he became renowned for his novel Max Havelaar, first published in 1860, which was based on his time in the Dutch East Indies.

Ina Rilke is a translator of Dutch and French and has received the Vondel Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the Flemish Culture Prize for her translations. She lives in Amsterdam and Paris.

David McKay is a translator of Dutch literature and was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for his translation of Stefan Hertman’s War and Turpentine.