53 pages • 1 hour read
David LissThe Coffee Trader
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Coffee
The novel begins with an evocative description of coffee: “It rippled thickly in the bowl, dark and hot and uninviting” (3). Throughout the story, coffee’s effect on all the senses is explored. Initially coffee is perceived as something exotic and mysterious. Numerous references are made to its smell, “the sharp odor of earth and rank leaves” (3); its color, which is “blacker than the wines of Cahors” (13); and its taste, which has “a rich, almost enchanting, bitterness” (14). In particular, coffee’s bitter taste metaphorically represents Hannah’s disappointment with her marriage to Daniel. She imagines eating coffee berries with Miguel, tossing them in her mouth “as though she had been eating bitter fruit all her life—which, after all, she had” (97).
Later, Miguel becomes aware of how coffee heightens his mental state. He feels energized and alert after drinking coffee, and it increases his desire to engage in trade. He understands what Geertruid meant when she said that “coffee is the drink of commerce” (107).
Hannah feels not only the psychological but also the physical effects of coffee. She quickly goes from enjoying the coffee berries to becoming addicted to them. When she goes without coffee for more than a day, “her desire for it made her head ache” (160). And after she finally drinks coffee in liquid form for the first time, “it filled her with a glowing warmth […] the way she had imagined love would when she’d been younger” (183).
Clothing
The characters’ clothing reveals both their culture and their religion. Hannah’s headscarf indicates that she is Jewish, as the Ma’amad orders all Jewish women to cover their head and hair. This tradition is so ingrained that Hannah is terrified when Annetje runs away with her headscarf as a joke, because she knows that being seen on the street without it is cause for serious punishment. When Hannah goes to Miguel’s cellar and her headscarf comes loose, Miguel “would hardly have been more shocked had she exposed to him her bare breasts” (154).
As a Dutch woman, Geertruid enjoys the freedom of dressing as she pleases, and she opts for attention-getting outfits, such as “a red and black dress, cut low to expose her ample bosom” (102). While Hannah fears letting even a lock of hair escape her scarf, Geertruid wears “a pert little red cap sat aside her head, showing off to the world the generous pile of nut-brown hair” (102).
Men’s clothing in Portugal is comprised of “suits of reds and golds and bright blues” (50), which is the preference of Parido and Daniel. Miguel, by contrast, adopts the dark suits of the Dutch. These somber colors are the influence of the Reformed Church, which discouraged gaudy colors. However, some men in Amsterdam “spiced their dark ensembles with fine cloth, expensive lace, silk collars and costly hats” (77).
The variety of clothing styles demonstrates Amsterdam’s multicultural flavor as well as its tolerance, as “strange clothes were admired more often than ridiculed” (77).
Charming Pieter
Miguel enjoys reading adventure stories, especially “salacious tales of crime” (54). His favorites are the Charming Pieter stories about the “wily bandit who had been playing his wily tricks on the foolish rich in and around Amsterdam for years” (55) and his Goodwife Mary. Geertruid, Hendrick, and their friends enjoy reading the stories aloud and toasting Charming Pieter’s triumphs. Miguel is not quite sure whether the stories are fact or legend, but he is intrigued by Pieter’s cleverness and envies that Pieter celebrates his deception rather than hides it, as Miguel and the rest of the Secret Jews were forced to do. For Miguel, living a life of deceit is a burden, and he “longed, like Charming Pieter, to be a trickster instead of a liar” (55).
Miguel views Charming Pieter as a role model and makes important decisions based on what he believes the trickster would do in that situation. In front of the Ma’amad, Miguel resolves to win this battle in a manner “worthy of Charming Pieter” (235). Miguel considers hiring Hendrick to beat Joachim after he recalls a story where Charming Pieter, “outmatched by an enemy’s physical prowess, […] hired an even more dangerous ruffian to protect himself” (260).
While Charming Pieter embodies clever trickery through most of the novel, Geertruid finally reveals to Miguel that she and Hendrick are the real-life Charming Pieter and his Goodwife Mary.
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By David Liss
