The Song and the Truth     by Helga Ruebsamen, Translated by Paul Vincent Original title: Het lied en de waarheid Original language: Dutch Original year: 1997 Published by Knopf Pub. Date: February 5, 2002 Format: Paperback, 368 pages Dimensions: 0.84 x 7.96 x 5.22 in. ISBN: 0375702776 List Price: $14.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $11.20 Published by Alfred Knopf, New York Not available for ordering Published by Harvill, London Pub. Date: 2001 Not available for ordering

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When it was first published in 1997, The Song and the Truth was an immediate commercial and critical success in the Netherlands. It tells the story of a young Dutch girl, Lulu Benda, growing up on the island of Java before the Second World War. Everything is seen through the eyes of this child, who is five when the novel opens. The same narrative device has been used in other Dutch colonial literature, from Du Perron’s Country of Origin and Hella Haasse’s Forever a Stranger, through Maria Dermout’s Days before Yesterday to Jeroen Brouwers’ Sunken Red, as a way of producing powerful evocations of the lost tropical paradise of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), framed in an illusion of innocence.


The novel focuses on four episodes in the life of Lulu Benda between 1938 and 1945, first in Java and Bali, then in Paris, and finally in Holland during the Nazi occupation. It is a tale of loss, first of her grandfather at sea, then of her mother who moves to London in 1940, and finally of her father when he starts a new family with their nanny Aleida. In between, there is the haunting account of the drowning of Lulu’s half-Balinese cousin Tinka, who imagined she could walk on water from Scheveningen beach all the way back to Bali.


The chronology follows the life of Helga Ruebsamen herself, who was born in Batavia in 1934 and left the East Indies for Holland on the eve of the Second World War. But the novel is above all an exquisitely crafted work of memory and imagination, which charts with infinite care Lulu’s struggle to understand the strange actions and words of the adults around her, and the magical doubling of her nightlife when everything is different from daytime reality and people and events turn into all kinds of animals, birds and spirits, Much of the book’s effect derives from the directness of Lulu’s memories, which are however interspersed, increasingly as the story proceeds, with the unanswered questions of an older and more knowing narrator.

The house where my memories begin was in the garden of Dewi Lesuma, who had been a princess until she had been turned into a stream by the gods. The stream wound its way through our garden. Dewi Kesuma was crystal clear and charming, except in the rainy season, when she became swollen, and flooded.

Farther out stood the waringin tree, which had once been a prince. It was so large that it could be seen from a long way off. It was at the front of our grounds, near the entrance. It cast its shadow over our garden and part of the road, which led from the town to the hills. In the hills, amid the blue mists, lay the volcano Tankuban Prahu, an upturned towing boat, under which a fire god slept.

If our house had been an animal, it would have been an elephant. With its head turned toward the road, the elephant lay waiting for I know not what. The two while pillars by our front door were its tusks. Above them were tall oblong windows, its dark, wide-open eyes that looked out at the world with curiosity. (p. 9-10, tr. Paul Vincent)