In this novel we see the young Dutch girl Riek growing up as an only child on a plantation in Central Java, at a distance from her Dutch parents, and in intimate contact with the native servants — Oerip, Karto, Asi and Neng, Mangoen, Roos and Boeyoeng — and their culture of storytelling. It is a culture with which Maria Dermoût was intimately familiar, both from personal experience and from her wide reading. This inspired her stories of the native circus performance, of the travelling dancers passing on the road outside her walled garden, and perhaps also of the old man in the mountains with his extraordinary knowledge of Javanese lore and legend.


Riek is the main character and focus of the story. The novel derives its freshness from the fact that we perceive the events through her eyes and mind. Much like Maria Dermoût herself (but we find the same theme in Hella Haasse’s novella Oeroeg), Riek lives in two very different and unevenly balanced worlds, that of the European adults and that of the ‘native’ servants. As she grows up, people around her disappear or die and she has to come to terms with the loss first of Roos, then of aunt Nancy and uncle Fred. In the end Riek herself has to leave and sail to Holland to attend secondary school there. The novel ends when, on the eve of her departure, she looks back on her life in Java.

There was so much: beside the people, the things she loved — her place on earth until then — the big house with the white marble floor and the black star, and the golden birds on the screens, the green walled garden, all the trees, all the flowers, the mountains — the lawn beyond the garden wall. All the other mountains, the whole list, she had learned them all by heart.

Java and its blue mountains, and the blue sea around it. In the North, the Java Sea, in the South the Pacific; to the left the Sunda Straits, to the right the Madura Strait, as they were on the map in the school room.

She needed time to lose it all. (p. 142, tr. Hans Koningsberger)