Translation:Max Havelaar/15

I really long to know, reader, to know exactly how long I can make a heroine float in the air, before you would, when I described a castle, throw the book away, discouraged, without waiting for the moment when the woman comes down again. If I needed a jump in the air during my story, I'd be so careful to let her jump from the first floor, in a castle about which I could tell very little. But rest assured for the time eing, that, Havelaar's house had only a ground floor, and the heroine of my book – my dear, the dear, faithful undemanding Tine, a heroine – never jumped out of a window.

When I finished the previous chapter, promising something else in the next chapter, this was actually only a literary trick, to finish the chapter in a nice way, since I did not really mean that the next chapter would offer any diversion. An author is vain like... a man. Speak evil about his mother or the colour of his hair, say that he speaks with an Amsterdam accent – which an Amsterdammer will never admit – and he will forgive you these things. But... never touch the outer parts of the smallest particle of an important matter in his writings... he will never forgive you! So if you do not like my book and we should accidentally meet, you had better pretend that we do not know one another.

No, even such a chapter for diversion seems, through the magnifying glass of an author's vanity, extremely important, and if you skip it, and afterwards were not truly satisfied with the book, I would not hesitate to rebuke you: for that was why you could not appreciate my book, because you had skipped the most important parts. Thus I consider – for I am a man and an author – every chapter important which you had skipped because of an unforgivable frivolity.

I imagine that your wife asks: "is it a rather nice book?" And you say for example – horribile auditu for me – with the eloquence of which all married men are known:

Hm... well... I don't know.

Well, barbarian, read on! The most important is yet to come. And with a trembling lip I stare at you, measuring the thickness of the leaves that have been turned, and I search on your face for the reflection of that wonderful chapter.

No, I say, he isn't there yet. Soon he will jump up, take something to kiss it in ecstasy, perhaps his wife.

But you read further. The "best chapter" must be past, I think. You did not jump up, and you have not kissed anything.

And the leaves under your right thumb get fewer, my hope for the kiss is waning – yea sure, I had even hoped for a tear!

And you have finished the novel until the moment "where they get one another", and you say – in some way, eloquence in the real state - yawning:

So, So! It's a book that … hm, well, they write so much nowadays!

But don't you know, vermin, tiger, European, reader, don't you know that for one hour you have been biting my spirit as if it were a toothpick? With gnawing and chewing on flesh and bone of your generation? Man-eater, that was my soul, my soul which you have chewed like grass! It was my heart that you have swallowed like a sweet. For in that book I had lain my heart and my soul, and I dropped so many tears on the manuscript, and my blood streamed away from my veins while I was writing, and I gave you all of this, you bought it for a few pennies and you say "hm".

The reader will understand that I speak not about my book.

As I like to say, just like Abraham Blankaart...