Mart Smeets

Reading relay of the novel 'Oeroeg' by Hella Haasse by eighty well-known and lesser-known Dutch people. Each person reads a page aloud, after which the book is passed on to the next reader. Philip Freriks, news anchor and ambassador for Nederland Leest, opens the reading relay. Director Shireen Strooker concludes it. 'Oeroeg' is Hella Haasse's debut novel from 1948. Haasse tells the story of the friendship between an Indonesian boy and the son of a Dutch administrator at a tea plantation in the Dutch East Indies before the Second World War. Gradually, the two boys grow apart. When the narrator, the Dutch boy, returns to the Indies—which has not yet quite become Indonesia—after studying in Delft, their estrangement turns out to have grown into a chasm. The final sentence reads: "Am I forever a stranger in the land of my birth, on the soil from which I do not wish to be uprooted? Time will tell."

What drives a great sport journalist – who has seen everything – to cover NBA games for Dutch television, in the middle of the night, all by himself, in a quiet, chilly, and empty studio? Matthijs van Nieuwkerk follows Mart Smeets.

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