Max Havelaar

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 falled. 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 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.