He eventually concluded that Dutch colonialism was doomed to fail. Yet he argued that these changes did not truly address the issues he had exposed, and was disappointed that Max Havelaar had not propelled him into an illustrious career in public administration or politics. The book was a great success and provoked public and political debate, eventually leading to changes in colonial policy, and Multatuli became a celebrated author. He hoped that the novel Max Havelaar (1860), by bringing the problems to public attention, would lead to meaningful reform and his reinstatement as a senior official. His protests against abuses in the Dutch colonial system led to tension with his superiors and eventually to his resignation in 1856. Multatuli (the pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker 1820–1887) was born in Amsterdam and served as a colonial official in the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) for almost twenty years. 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.
Max Havelaar, however, is as notable for its art as it is for its politics. 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. 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.
Havelaar’s impassioned exposé is framed by the fatuous reflections of an Amsterdam coffee trader, Drystubble, into whose hands it has fallen. 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.Ī 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.
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