Writersblog

Salomon Kroonenberg

Salomon Kroonenberg, Dutch writer

The Dutch programme at the International Book Fair in Beijing was cunn... >>> read more

Henk Pröpper

Henk Pröpper, Director Dutch Foundation for Literature

In two weeks’ time, the official opening of one of the largest b... >>> read more

Kai Kang

Kai Kang, Journalist China Reading Weekly

Dear Dutch publishers. The book fair is over. Perhaps you’ll now... >>> read more

Ingrid and Dieter Schubert

Ingrid and Dieter Schubert, Dutch illustrators

The days are full and long. We are incessantly bombarded with impressi... >>> read more

Michele Hutchison

Michele Hutchison, Editor De Arbeiderspers

Arriving on the stand on the first day, I’d asked a Chinese visi... >>> read more

Michele Hutchison

Michele Hutchison, Editor De Arbeiderspers

Big excitement today since we were finally meeting with Songyu from Fl... >>> read more

Ingrid and Dieter Schubert

Ingrid and Dieter Schubert, Dutch illustrators

It’s now the third day, and the first one with plenty of sun. Un... >>> read more

Kai Kang

Kai Kang, Journalist China Reading Weekly

What a great opportunity to learn about the Dutch literature for Chine... >>> read more

Salomon Kroonenberg

Salomon Kroonenberg, Dutch writer

A duck flies to and fro over the vast expanses of world ocean, despera... >>> read more

Michele Hutchison

Michele Hutchison, Editor De Arbeiderspers

‘In the era of browsing, we provide reading.’ - Slogan see... >>> read more

Michele Hutchison

Michele Hutchison, Editor De Arbeiderspers

The jewel in the crown of our collection of Arbeiderspers titles publi... >>> read more

Michele Hutchison

Michele Hutchison, Editor De Arbeiderspers

The Chinese publishers I have met during the course of my career, the ... >>> read more

Salomon Kroonenberg

Salomon Kroonenberg, Dutch writer

I have so far never been to a book fair. Nor do I know what to imagine... >>> read more

Kai Kang

Kai Kang, Journalist China Reading Weekly

Since 2006, I began writing about the Netherlands’ performance a... >>> read more

Henk Pröpper

Henk Pröpper, Director Dutch Foundation for Literature

Now that the fair is just round the corner, this is perhaps the moment... >>> read more

Michele Hutchison

Michele Hutchison, Editor De Arbeiderspers

The traffic in Beijing is horrendous, I’m sure the other blogger... >>> read more

Thomas Möhlmann

Thomas Möhlmann, Staff member Dutch Foundation for Literature

What an evening the poets and the approximately 200 onlookers present ... >>> read more


Maria Dermoût - The Ten Thousand Things

Maria Dermoût - The Ten Thousand Things

First published in 1955, The Ten Thousand Things was immediately recognized as a truly magical work. Maria Dermoût depicts the idyllic setting beautifully, and she handles the legends and darker aspects of the story, ghosts, superstition, even murder, with consummate skill.

On an island in the Moluccas (present-day Indonesia) a few old spice gardens are left. One of these is home to Felicia, the fifty-year-old descendant of a long line of Dutch nutmeg planters. Her parents and her husband and son are long dead and she has nothing left. At least, so she feels in her darker moments. In reality she is surrounded by a sea of things (her house, the forest, the river, the fragrances of the island) and a jumbled collection of memories and fantasies. Dermoût’s conviction that mankind is part of a higher plan is palpable throughout. A murder may bring great sorrow, but it cannot disturb the cosmic order that governs the animate and inanimate worlds.

Maria Dermoût’s novel was unlike anything Dutch (or European) literature had ever seen before, displaying a form of animism built not on primitive superstition but on a love that encompasses the whole of creation.

Biography

Maria Dermoût (1888-1962) was born Maria Ingerman on a sugar plantation in the Dutch East Indies and educated in Holland. She returned to the Indies with her husband, a lawyer, and spent thirty years living, as she later described it, ‘in every town and wilderness on the islands of Java, Celebes, and the Moluccas’.

QUOTES

  • ‘Mrs. Dermoût, in the manner of Thoreau and the early Hemingway, is an extraordinary sensualist. But her approach is not the muzzy, semi-poetic one in which the writer damagingly affixes his own imagination to what he sees. Instead, her instinct for beauty results, again and again, in passages of a startling, unadorned, three-dimensional clarity; often one can almost touch what she describes.’ - The New Yorker