The Ten Thousand Things

Maria Dermoût (1888-1962) was born on a sugar plantation in the Dutch East Indies and educated in Holland. She then returned to the Indies with her husband, a jurist, and spent thirty years living in, she later wrote, "every town and wilderness of the islands of Java, Celebes, and the Moluccas." In 1951, at the age of sixty-three, Dermoût published her first book, a memoir called Yesterday. Her celebrated novel The Ten Thousand Things was published in 1955. »

Hans Koning, born Hans Koningsberger in Amsterdam, came to this country in 1951 and established himself as an American writer in 1958 with his first novel, The Affair. Among his other novels are A Walk with Love and Death, The Petersburg Cannes Express, The Kleber Flight, and, most recently, Zeeland, or Elective Concurrences. »

By Maria Dermout
Translated and with an introduction by Hans Koning

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.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

Dermout beautifully depicts the idyllic setting and handles the darker aspects of the story—ghosts, superstition, even murder—with equal skill.
— Publishers Weekly, September 9, 2002

A son murdered by the head-hunters of Ceram. Three ghost-sisters playing on an empty beach. The curiosity cabinet and its contents. As the story circles on itself, they number in the thousands, so that anything once loved is eternal, beautiful, unchanged.
— Linda Spalding, in Lost Classics

This is a beautiful book. What's curious, you get the tone that makes you recognize that Michael Ondaatje is part of a culture, not simply a singular writer; he's part of a whole way of seeing reality.
— Robert Creeley

Beautiful and eerie.
— The Atlantic

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.
— Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker

An original book, beautifully written, one that succeeds in bringing forth in its charm and mystery an unfamiliar and very old and very odd and real bit of the world.
— Eudora Welty

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $13.95
Price: $10.46 (25% off)

Jul 31, 2002
224 pages
ISBN: 159017013X
9781590170137
All Literature in Translation
NYRB Classics

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