The Ten Thousand Things     by Maria Dermout, Translated by Hans Koningsberger Original title: De tienduizend dingen Original language: Dutch Original year: 1956 Published by New York Review of Books, Inc., The Pub. Date: 2002 Format: Paperback, 208 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.49 x 7.94 x 5.02 ISBN: 159017013X List Price: $12.95, £8.23 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.23 Buy online from Amazon.com for $10.36 Published by Secker & Warburg, London Pub. Date: 1958 Format: 249 pages Not available for ordering Published by Ballantine, New York Pub. Date: 1967 Format: 218 pages Not available for ordering Published by University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst Pub. Date: 1983 Format: 218 pages Not available for ordering Published by Aventure, New York Pub. Date: 1984 Format: 244 pages Not available for ordering

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Maria Dermoût (1888-1961) was born and grew up on the Indonesian island of Java. Although she had been telling and writing stories all her life, she didn’t start publishing until she was in her sixties. Her two novels, The Ten Thousand Things and Days Before Yesterday (Nog pas gisteren, 1951) both proved hugely successful and were widely translated at the time. They was followed in the early 1960s by a number of stories — as yet uncollected — in magazines like Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and The London Magazine.


The Ten Thousand Things, orginally published in 1951, is set on the island of Amboyna in the Moluccas, the original ‘Spice Islands’. Like her 17th-century predecessor, the naturalist Georg Rumphius, whose Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet of 1705 recently appeared in English translation, Maria Dermoût positively delights in the art of description. By recreating the sights, smells and sounds of the island, and interweaving these with the apparitions of native lore and creole imagination and with tales of passion and death, her writing richly evokes the island and the people who once lived there.


The central theme of the novel is that of death and the remembrance of those who died — like her own son, who did not survive the Japanese concentration camps during the Second World War. The evocative power of her narrative, laconic and romantic at the same time, and the seeming artlessness and engaging hesitancy of her style, remind one of the Caribbean stories of Jean Rhys in Sleep it off, Lady (1976).

Someone sang a love song in the moonlight: ‘the evening is too long, beloved, and the road too far’ — others clapped their hands with it — a single bamboo flute, languishing.

A lullaby for a child, or a story sung to it, battle songs of the wild Alfuras, head-hunters of Ceram. And sometimes, very rarely, the old heathen lament (careful, don’t let the schoolteacher hear it) for one who has just died. ‘The hundred things’ was the name of the lament — the hundred things of which the dead one is reminded, which are asked him, told him.

Not only the people in his life: this girl, this woman and that one, that child, your father, your mother, a brother or a sister, the grandparents, a grandchild, a friend, a comrade-in-arms; or his possessions: your beautiful house, your china dishes hidden in the attic, the swift proa, your sharp knife, the little inlaid shield from long ago, the two silver rings on your right hand, on index finger and thumb, the tamed pigeon; but also: hear, how the wind blows! — how white-crested the waves come running from the high sea! — the fishes jump out of the water and play with each other — look how the shells gleam on the beach — remember the coral gardens under water, and how they are colored — and the bay! — the bay! — please never forget the bay! And then they said: oh soul of so-and-so, and ended with a long-held melancholy ee-ee-ee? ee-ee-ee? over the water. (p. 13-14, tr. Hans Koningsberger)