topics: |  fiction | netherlands | indonesia

The Ten Thousand Things is a novel of shimmering strangeness—the
story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice
Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over
which her powerful grandmother still presides. There Felicia finds herself
wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where
objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the
present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermoût's novel was
immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch—or
European—literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced
vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is
exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and
life.
... paints a realistic (though sad) picture of the Moluccas and their
people, rather than just using them as an exotic background to her story.