Around the turn of the millennium, Pascale Casanova famously argued that literature outside the Anglo-French core had to seek ways to enter the nineteenth-century concept of world literature through formal audacity. In the periphery, formal innovation proceeded not step by step but in leaps and bounds. The U.S. spawned Herman Melville, while Brazil gave the world Machado de Assis. The Netherlands produced one such masterpiece: Multatuli’s Max Havelaar, an anti-novel published in 1860 that follows the quixotic bureaucrat Havelaar on his quest for justice for the millions of exploited Javanese in the Dutch East Indies.

Multatuli, the pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker, grounded the novel in his own experiences. Born to a lower-middle-class Amsterdam family, he spent his adulthood in the service of the Dutch Empire in the East, where he clashed with colonial authorities. Max Havelaar recounts, among other things, a narrow-minded coffee trader duped into financing a book that exposes colonial exploitation and inadvertently spurs political reform.

Apart from its explosive theme, the novel was above all a formal and literary gem. The baggy, shape-shifting narrative was out of place not only in the colonial backwater of Rangkas Bitung where it takes place, but also within the somnolent Dutch nineteenth century, where writers were not rebels but well-heeded burghers. Composed of letters, bureaucratic reports, lists, satire, and even a short play, Max Havelaar stood apart from the realist canon that was consolidating in Britain and France. Through this collision of textual genres the novel exposed, both ethically and structurally, the contradictions between the Dutch liberal self-image and the violent conditions of its accumulated wealth. Under the pressures of empire, conventional narrative realism deforms.

Not a cheap global novel

The same is true for Oroppa, the sprawling debut novel by Safae el Khannoussi, born in Tanger in 1994. El Khannoussi doesn’t take her cues from homegrown Dutch modernism, but from global luminaries such as Danilo Kiš or Roberto Bolaño. The global circulation of literary forms has proven to be a boon to writers from smaller countries, as the formal innovation that drove historical modernism now happens almost instantaneously. This is even more true for the Netherlands. One consequence may be that contemporary Dutch writers rapidly cycle through Anglophone models—if they don’t start writing in English directly, that is, as Yaël van der Wouden did in her Booker Prize-nominated novel The Safekeep (2024).

Oroppa, however, is not simply the poor product of literary globalization. Unlike most of her Dutch-language contemporaries, Safae el Khannoussi had an early access to Arabic and Francophone literature, the formative influence of which on her debut is unmistakable. Readable and worldly, the novel’s form beams high modernist seriousness, and ties postcolonial Moroccan literature with oral traditions and testimonio. Aesthetic influence is never a one-way street here—Bolaño and Kiš after all affected the U.S. core from the outside—and writers on the margins of the literary world appropriate dominant forms rebelliously, resisting the erasure of their specific experiences. Might El Khannoussi have accomplished both?

Oroppa soared into the world of Dutch letters, winning two major commercial prizes which propelled it to bestselling status. Rights to the book have sold to a dozen countries to date, with English and French translations forthcoming. This international popularity can be explained, in part, by the novel’s grandiose geographical scope, toggling between postcolonial Morocco, the global hub of Amsterdam, diasporic, subterranean Paris, and Tunis after the fall of Ben Ali. With its cosmopolitan decor and ever-increasing cast of characters, Oroppa has a mazelike quality. Yet the core story is relatively simple, centered on Salomé Abergel, a Jewish-Moroccan political dissident who has recently disappeared, and her erstwhile torturer Yousef Slaoui. The novel draws its historical depth from Morocco’s traumatic “Years of Lead,” which peaked in the late seventies and early eighties under the reign of Hassan II. In the present, Abergel lives in exile in Amsterdam’s Rivierenbuurt district and has become a successful painter, while Slaoui appears as a sodden, defeated drunk across the river IJ in the purgatorial Amsterdam-Noord. When Slaoui unexpectedly appears at her doorstep, Abergel panics, dispels him with boiling water and flees to Tunisia.

Shipwrecked in Rivierenbuurt

A less ambitious writer might have stopped here. Not so El Khannoussi, who lets the encounter reverberate across two continents and a dozen cities. In Paris’ Belleville district, Abergel’s son Irad—born in a Moroccan prison and now proprietor of a café frequented by migrants and drifters—sets off to Amsterdam to learn what became of his mother. Hbib Lebyad, an overweight former circus artist and Tunisian snack-bar owner, entrusts Abergel’s apartment and her remaining paintings to his favorite employer Hind. Salomé herself has taken refuge in Lebyad’s old house in Tunis, where she is stalked by her nervous curator—to no avail. The actual occupant of the house is one of the many strong secondary characters of the book, a figure doubling as an allegory for the region’s post-revolutionary stagnation: Azzedine, a demoralized clerk much like his own father, whose only job at the courthouse has been the indefinite extension of bureaucracy. Azzedine turns out to be a childhood friend of Irad, while Slaoui, as far as speculation goes, might be Irad’s father. In the final part of the book, Irad reads a bundle of searing Angstcahiers—“fear diaries”—left behind by an anonymous female Moroccan poet, who went into exile with Salomé in the early eighties after their time in prison. The diaries, laid out before the narrator’s eyes, fill in some of the gaps in his mother’s life, but can only do so obliquely and discontinuously.

Not all of these figures or storylines are equally persuasive, but their proliferation generates its own momentum. Only after a hundred or so diffuse pages, El Khanoussi succeeds, with the dragged out, Captain Ahab-like introduction of Slaoui, in grounding the narrative; and only in the last third of the novel Salomé turns, in true Bolaño-fashion, from rumor into acting part. Yet by the end, one senses that the procession of dispersed immigrants from the underbelly of Europe has been the true protagonist all along. In this “Oroppa”, as the continent is known in the Maghreb, the voices of chorus and individual are difficult to separate.

There is more than a trace of The Fall in Slaoui’s steady decline. Like Camus’ tale of a Parisian lawyer erring through Amsterdam’s concentric canals as though through the circles of hell, Slaoui moves through a city that mirrors his inner corrosion. With El Khannoussi it is an entire continent, and the breakdown more subtle. Amsterdam’s damp obscurity does lend a particularly Dutch form to moral detachment and evasiveness, a refusal or inability to be present to history. This is also true of Oroppa, which introduces Amsterdam and its Rivierenbuurt’s “morose monotony” through a remarkably comfortable narrator. One is reminded of the stuffy nineteenth-century novels Multatuli had already chided, or else of Gerard Reve, the nation’s wry chronicler of petty-bourgeois, domestic life. Indeed, Oroppa’s opening echoes the weary, omniscient ironic tone of The Evenings, Reve’s classic 1947 novel that follows aimless postwar youth who roam Amsterdam ghostly streets. Yet while Reve leaves these haunted houses standing, El Khannoussi demolishes them brick by brick. This gesture is all the sharper in a country whose cultivated smallness has long been used to mask its outsized role in empire and global capitalism. What remains is a hollowed national interior, capacious enough to hold foreign workers but unable to narrate itself.