Customer Reviews

Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company (Penguin Classics)

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By this 19th century novel an attempt was made to arise the awareness of the general public in the Netherlands to the oppression of the Indonesian people by the Dutch colonial system. The book is a cry for justice. The story is set in Amsterdam and Java and has a surprising structure, with changing perspective, and an almost independent romantic story on the love between Saidjah and Adinda. It is romantic, melodramatic even, jet thought-provoking and despite its heavy subject funny and very readable. Yes, certainly rereadable. It gets more beautiful everytime I reread it. I've both read the Dutch original book and this translation, and I think a perfect job has been done.

This book is one of the most important books of Dutch literature. The writer combines humour, emotion and facts. The book has a complex structure, without making it difficult to read, an outspoken view, but also more subtle jokes (at least in the Dutch language, and for people aware of Dutch culture), a perceptive view on the way the institutions in the Dutch East Indies worked to promote the corruption and the exploitation of the people. All these things make the book an enjoyment to read.

The writer, however, isn't trying to make an objective unemotional description of the events in the East Indies, but he is arguing - making a treatise - for a different/better treatment of the people in the Indonesia, basing his treatise on facts and emotions (he stresses the parts which are undisputed facts in a very natural way). For this he uses al his (well developed) rhetorical abilities.

To give some examples of his rhetorical abilities and the working of the structure:
- at some point in the book he argues against painters which try to show the multitude of misery caused by a certain event, by painting the quantity involved. He argues that this makes people numb for the suffering shown on the painting. Why the writer tells this is unclear, until later when he starts telling a dramatic story about the injustice and suffering endured by an Indonesian boy. Then it becomes clear that this suffering is endured by many Indonesians, but instead of making you dazzle with numbers he tries (and succeeds) to make you feel compassionate with one individual. Only to make you realise afterwards that there are/were many individuals which are enduring the same suffering!
- and instead of stating with certain facts: `this is a fact', he makes himself angry about how shocking/outrages something is, only to afterwards state: `it is true: you can look it up here, or there'.
These are just two examples, but the entire book is a rhetoric masterwork!

However, readers expecting a balanced book will be disappointed. The writer didn't strive for consensus, he strove to make an as great as possible contrast between his ideals (good) and the Dutch merchantmen spirit (evil). The treatise worked much in the same way as the books/movies of Micheal Moore do today. Mixing emotion, fact and rhetorical ability (although Multatuli has greater literary abilities) to create a document that polarises society about great contemporary political issues.

Most people turn to this book in order to learn about 19 century colonialism. However the book is stunningly contemporary as a picture of universal human types, and of a particular type, which is especially well refined and developed in the Netherlands. I suppose because of the Netherlands history of Calvinism, wealth, "apartheid", provincialism - people living in separate sub communities defined by religion, who only care for those in their own group. Moreover the book is a multimedia self-referring extravaganza avant-la-letter, masterfully written. Approached in the right frame of mind it is at the same time desparately funny and funnily desparate.

I recently asked 8 Dutch university students if they had read it - the most famous book in Dutch literature. 7 had not. One had started but had thrown it away half finished because it was all so depressingly familiar. (Familiar as a picture of present day attitudes in the Netherlands).

Max Havelaar is the best story of the 1000 years and the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the Dutch East Indies, according to the Indonesian novelist Pramodeya Ananta Toer. The billing piqued my search for the novel.
Max Havelaar, of the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company was written in 1860 by Eduward Douwes Dekker under the pen name Multatuli. The intrigue unfolds from the points of view of Droogstoppel, a stuffy Dutch coffee broker; Scarfman, an aspiring writer; Havelaar, an idealist and newly appointed Resident of Labak, Java; Blatherer, a preacher; Saijah, a young servant yearning for his love; and others, all affected by coffee markets. Interspersed are direct writings from author to reader. These asides are at times lengthy, quaint, or preachy. Not an easy read, yet intriquing enough to drive me to keep turning the pages. Indeed, the author himself describes his work as "chaotic, disjointed, striving for effect, bad in style, lacking skill.....but the substance is irrefutable." Most appealing are descriptions applicable today. Anyone who has ever been expected to report only the positive to corporate superiors, is bothered by products made by "millions who are maltreated or exploited in your name," or notices empires go to war more easily than mills are moved is bound to welcome this book. The novel hastened abolition of the Dutch Cultural System requiring compulsory growing of particular crops. Toer's characterization, if over the top, afforded me the opportunity of a brilliant read.

... of the Modern Novel, Max Havelaar is a disaster. A hodge-podge. A clumsy polemic thinly disguised as an biography of a fictive hero ... until the final veil is cast aside and the 'author' reveals his still-masked face under the pseudonym Multatuli. But Max Havelaar ISN'T a Modern Novel. The rules don't apply. Though it was published in 1860, it's closer to an 18th C novel of 'sensibility', much like Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy or A Sentimental Journey. Is it mere serendipity that the fictional scribe in Max Havelaar, the German student who assembles the notes of the Scarfman into a book purporting to deal with coffe auctions, is named Ludwig Stern? A critic might also trace Multatuli's peculiar narrative mayhem to another pseudonymous author, Stendahl, whose Le Rouge et le Noir and whose autobiographical Life of Henry Brulard are equally spasmodic in structure.

Multatuli in the flesh was Eduard Douwes Dekker, a Dutchman born in 1820 who joined the East Indian Civil Service at age 18, rose steadily in rank during his years of service in Java, and resigned in protest against brutal colonial exploitation in 1856. The character Max Havelaar is indeed Dekker's avatar, but Dekker's career is narrated third hand: by Stern, who edits the manuscripts of Scarfman, who reports on the trials and tribulations of Havelaar. Odd structure? Well, it's even stranger yet, since the literary labors of Stern are commissioned by his coffee merchant host in Amsterdam, Batavus Drystubble, a pompous philistine who interrupts the very book he's commissioned with chapters of his own illiberal blather. And one of Drystubble's interpolations is the full text of a sermon by Reverend Blatherer, a Calvinist assertion of God's implicit favor for the rich and detestation for the hapless shiftless color-stained poor. Drystubble and Blatherer could easily be identified by a contemporary reader as foreshadowings of billionaire David Koch and any of the fundamentalist preachers of the extreme Right in American politics. Greed and self-righteousness have ye always with you!

But if Max Havelaar isn't a proper Modern Novel, perhaps it's a premature post-modernist novel, a collage of realia and fantasy, a deliberate `theater of the absurd' blending sentimental poetry, caricature, factual reportage, and confessional self-psychotherapy.

What it was for its audience -- the citizens of the Dutch Republic at the height of its colonial dominion over many millions of Javanese, Malays, and other peoples of the Indonesian archipelago -- was a shocking exposé of their callous treatment of their non-Dutch subjects. Dekker's purpose was not artistry; it was muckraking, and it had a modicum of impact on Dutch colonial adminstration in the short term. That the book also has enduring literary strengths is somewaht accidental.

Beyond its short term impact on Dutch and other European readers, the works of Multatuli had an extraordinary effect on the subsequent development of Indonesian literature and intellectualism. The novels of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, modern Indonesia's foremost author, are replete with references to Multatuli, and the stylistic peculiarities of Toer's books become less puzzling when one recognizes the enduring influence of Eduard Douwes Dekker.

Be forewarned, I purchased the $1 Kindle edition and it was not in English and therefore is not useful to me.

One can say that this work is a small man's grudge against hsi former employer.

But one cannot really sunstantiate such a point. Even if he did write it as a kick to the boss's shin it still is a major work.
Apart from the message which was and sadly still is and perhaps increasing issue in this world, it is magnificently told.
Perspective in perspective tell you in often as much as four layers and thus four filters the point the writer is stating.
As stated above by a more undoubtedly more learned reader, his technigues of argument are simply brilliant and any scholar should read this book just to brush up his essay writing.
Finally, his way with words is just dragging you through this novel in a way I've only seen Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde come close to.

p.s. Note to the guy above, did you happen to know that Multatuli indeed lived many years in poverty because of his believes, that when he became a succesful writer he dropped the pen after realising people only read his work and didn't act on it.
Living his last years as a recluse in Germany, bittered, and hopeless, instead of cashing on his succes.

This novel is by far the most fascinating novel I have ever read.
The background stories alone make it worth reading. Plus, as an Indonesian, I felt obligated to read the novel.
It was a very good read. Solid plot with a very unconventional ending. A masterpiece indeed.

I couldn't find this in English for my Kindle, however it is available for $3.99 from iBooks......
I just downloaded it to my iPad 10/25/11

Great book. And the Kindle edition is now in English. There's a German translation floating around on Amazon, and the Dutch original on-line, but the one I downloaded here is in English. Check the preview to be sure. (And I couldn't find the English translation as a free e-book at any of the other usual public sites.)