The Last House of the World, Beb Vuyk’s second novel, was published shortly before the end of the Dutch colonial era in the East. In 1949 the author opted, unusually, for Indonesian citizenship, but in 1958 she returned to the Netherlands, remaining stateless and making a living from her novels and stories, her Indonesian recipes and her journalistic work.


Beb Vuyk’s unsentimental, plain and almost spoken style of writing shows affinity with that of her friend, the author Edgar du Perron. The same goes for the autobiographical nature of her work. The Last House of the World is a story of toil and survival on the faraway island of Buru in the Moluccas, where this independent woman went to start a new life with her husband. The stories tell of everyday life on Buru, of their hard work on the land to revive the family’s eucalyptus oil business, of the house they build and their newborn children, and of the daily contacts with the Malays, Chinese, Arabs, Ambonese, Butonese and Binongkos with whom they live and work on the island.


Among the very few other Dutch people living on the island is the district officer, of whose colonial mentality she is sharply critical. Delusions of superiority were widespread among the Dutch colonials, and were due — as Jan de Hartog put it in The Spiral Road — to their ‘living as an Uebermensch among a servile population.’ Beb Vuyk makes much the same point, and she makes it very well, in her own way.

He is a very tall man, an officer in the Dutch army, but assigned to service in the Indies for five years. And perhaps that is the reason why he doesn’t have the typical colonial attitude. Almost everybody who comes to the Indies to find employment has begun to change before he gets off the boat. The unassuming man who embarks in Genoa has become several degrees more important by the time he disembarks in Priok. It is an oxidation process of the soul that nobody can escape. The Company has taken over the rights of the native chiefs, and for three hundred years now every newcomer upon arrival in the Indies has become automatically a chief, a leader, a very important person. He has become a European as soon as he leaves Europe. (p. 44, tr. André Lefevere)