Faded Portraits     by E. Breton De Nijs, Translated by Donald and Elsje Sturtevant Original title: Vergeelde portretten. Uit een Indisch familiealbum Original language: Dutch Original year: 1960 Published by Periplus Editions Pub. Date: October 1999 Format: Paperback, 176 pages Dimensions: 0.75 x 8.00 x 5.25 in. ISBN: 9625935118 List Price: $14.95 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £9.51 Published by Periplus, Singapore Pub. Date: 1999 Format: 176 pages Not available for ordering Published by University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst Pub. Date: 1982 Format: 176 pages Not available for ordering

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Breton de Nijs was the literary pseudonym of Rob Nieuwenhuys (1908-99), the grand old man of Dutch colonial literature. Under his own name he published widely in a career spanning almost half a century. He was editor of the literary periodical Orientatie (Orientation) published in Batavia/Jakarta from 1947 till 1953, during the violent transition to Indonesian independence. After his return to the Netherlands in 1952 he published a series of anthologies of Dutch colonial stories, a number of photographic albums of the old Dutch East Indies, and an invaluable literary history translated as Mirror of the Indies. A History of Dutch Colonial Literature (1982).


In his only novel, Faded Portraits, first published in Dutch in 1954, he offers a nostalgic group portrait of his own extended family, European landed gentry who had lived on the island of Java for generations. Written in a subdued, melancholic style but full of powerful memories, the novel captures a bygone way of life and the demise of a unique, mixed culture under the onslaught of modernization, nationalism and independence. The fragment below is the novel’s final paragraph. It tells of the large, old, colonial family house in Batavia, now empty and derelict — a fitting epitaph to the vanishing world of the colonial period.

Even though the people have disappeared, the house on Salemba Avenue is still there, but the rural and stately road has become cluttered, busy and noisy. Piles of sand and lime and stacks of beams and red bricks now lie in the yard. The house and grounds have been rented to a business in building materials. The stones in the driveway are sunken, deep wheel ruts lead to the back yard. The lawn that the gardener watered daily now shows bare spots as if it had mange. The house has fallen into decay and lost its purpose. The walls sweat in black and green patches, the woodwork is mouldered, and the gutters sag; the marble floors are dull and cracked. A sad demise. (p. 152, tr. D. & E. Sturtevant)