Episode 72 - "Max Havelaar, or, the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company" by Multatuli

But, yes, Ben, you just mentioned there the first thing I kind of wanted to bring up, which was how we decided to read this book.

So, listeners...

I don't know if this is really...

I feel like this has shown up on the show at some point, but maybe it hasn't.

A long-running joke between Ben and I is contempt for the Dutch.

The infernal Hollanders.

With wooden shoes and their big, dumb hats.

And they're just absolute mastery of capitalism before various other societies.

And so in some ways, when I see the Dutch, I see Americans as well.

So, yeah.

I

mean, yeah, quite a new Amsterdam.

Still cultural capital of the capitalist world.

Right.

But yes, we were sitting in a bar a year or two back and we were joking around and we were like... yeah, the Dutch, sure, they made some nice paintings of commodities, but had they written a single good novel?

And, like, I couldn't come up with any.

I was like, where are the good Dutch novels?

And it's interesting because you would figure, again, given the fact that Dutch and English are, like, such closely related languages, you would think there would be something that penetrated, you know, crossways.

And yeah, we could not think of anything.

And so we Googled best Dutch novels.

And we found this book, Max Havelaar.

which we found very funny.

It seems to be, in some circles, considered to be the most influential Dutch novel in the history of the language for reasons that we'll get into or may have already gotten into, depending on how we cut up the episode.

Anyway...

We found it very funny that this book that is considered so influential by Dutch language was written by a guy who had spent most of his life in the East Indies and was writing about the East Indies and did not seem to have a very high opinion of his countrymen.