3 stars
This was a compulsory read for my Dutch class. It's basically a sub-story to the book: ''Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company''.
Since this was such a short story, I don't feel like I can properly review this, so I'm just going to create a short description of my thoughts.
It is a very clearifying and an assumingly very realistic representation of the events that happened during this time. Life for the locals was a tough and a cruel one. The way Multatuli is able to mold this into a story with a moral is very interesting to me.
Other than that, the story is pretty simple and doesn't contain any 'deeper layers' other than showing the life of the locals. But, this was of course, during that time a revolutionary idea. He denounced the abuses of colonialism in the colony of the Dutch East Indies (today's Indonesia) in his book ''Max Havelaar''.
I find this a difficult one to rate, because it's intentions were (of course) entirely created to fit into that time period.
If I rate this based solely on how much I enjoyed it, I'd give this 2 stars.
The moral is 5 stars to me.