Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Com... by Multatuli

Max Havelaar is told from several different perspectives the reader first meets an Amsterdam coffee dealer named Droogstoppel, a man so obsessed with coffee that his every thought and action is governed by it. Max Havelaar is an undeniably autobiographical novel like his hero, Multatuli-the pseudonym for Eduard Douwes Dekker-was an Assistant Resident of Lebak in Java like Havelaar in the novel, he resigned his position when his accusations of corruption and abuse were disregarded by higher authorities, resulting in years of poverty for both author and fictional hero. The novel, written by a former official of the Dutch East Indian Civil Service under the pen name Multatuli, exposed the massive corruption and cruelty rife in the Dutch colony of Java. ' When Max Havelaar was first published in Holland in 1860, it ignited a major political and social brouhaha. The author got his contemporaries thinking about what colonialism really meant. The natives had no rights whatsoever and only worked to keep their own lives so they could create more money for their 'masters'. It is a work about the oppression of Europeans over other nations, you can compare it to what we have done in Africa or even to slavery.

It's subtitle ' Or the Coffee Auctions of a Dutch Trading Company,' does not really say a lot more about the book than just the plain title because it is a lot more about the life in Indonesia both for the local people as well as the colonialists back then than about the trading itself. In any case, I think it still has a message for us today, it is as important now as it was then. The book is translated (not just) into English but I read it in the original Dutch.

There are other lists around in the meantime where it is still number three, following ' The Discovery of Heaven' by Harry Mulisch and ' The House of the Mosque' by Kader Abdolah, two very influential and important works I highly recommend. ' Max Havelaar' is also called ' the book that killed colonialism' and was chosen as the most important book in Dutch literature in 2002. His book seemed to have opened the eyes of many Dutch people at the time as to what colonialism really meant. At least, he's from the same era and is just as popular in the Netherlands as Dickens is in the United Kingdom. Multatuli (Eduard Douwes Dekker) 'Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company' ( Dutch: Max Havelaar of de koffiveilingen der Nederlandsche Handelmaatschappy) - 1859Įduard Douwes Dekker aka Multatuli should probably be called the Dutch Charles Dickens.

Max Havelaar, or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Com... by Multatuli