Hoe hij raad van Indië werd

In the steamy colonial bureaucracy of the Dutch East Indies, a staggeringly ordinary civil servant rises to the highest echelons of power not through talent or merit, but through the relentless scheming of his two wives. Paul Adriaan Daum's razor-sharp novel dissects the absurdity of colonial ambition, showing how position, money, and erotic manipulation intertwine in a society where appearance is everything and substance is nothing. The protagonist drifts through his career like a cork on rising water, carried by forces he barely understands while his wives maneuver behind the scenes, trading favors and leveraging secrets with the precision of master chess players. Daum writes with a cool, observational eye that recalls Stendhal at his most sardonic, exposing a world where Dutch colonial society pretends to civilization while drowning in corruption and hollow pretense. The novel endures because its central observation remains piercing: that systems built on extraction and hierarchy produce only hollow people climbing toward hollow goals.