After they got reacquainted at a class reunion, Tommie drowned himself in the Bay of Bengal and left Bo with a collection of papers which, beside autobiographical material by Bo, also contains the memoirs of his grandfather, a frustrated idealist who left by boat for the Dutch Indies in the early 1900s, and managed to bed Mata Hari on the way.

[6] He was born in Batavia, the city founded in 1619 and the most important base of the Dutch colonial empire governed by the Dutch East India Company; this nostalgia is most clearly expressed by the grandfather of the narrator's childhood friend.

Van Deel sees in Bougainville the transition from Springer's earlier sensitive and witty work to a deeper, more serious engagement with his own writing.

[7] In 1985, it was published as a Salamander pocket, an affordable paperback version for the mass market, and newly printed (with new cover designs) in the same series in 1988 and 1993.

[9] In 1998, Bougainville, Springer's follow-up novel Quissama (1985), and Bandoeng-Bandung (1993) were published by Querido as Weemoed en verlangen (Nostalgia and Desire).