Maria Dermoût (1888-1962) was born on a sugar plantation in
the Dutch East Indies and educated in Holland. She then returned to
the Indies with her husband, a jurist, and spent thirty years
living in, she later wrote, “every town and wilderness of the
islands of Java, Celebes, and the Moluccas.” In 1951, at the age of
sixty-three, Dermoût published her first book, a memoir called
Yesterday. Her celebrated novel The Ten Thousand Things was
published in 1955.
Hans Koning, born Hans Koningsberger in Amsterdam, came to
this country in 1951 and established himself as an American writer
in 1958 with his first novel, The Affair. Among his other novels
are A Walk with Love and Death, The Petersburg Cannes Express, The
Kleber Flight, and, most recently, Zeeland, or Elective
Concurrences.
“Fans of magic realism will be thrilled to discover a long
out-of-print Dutch classic...Dermout writes exquisitely and
hauntingly of murder and loss, tolerance, and fear of “the other.”
--Library Journal
"Dermoût beautifully depicts the idyllic setting and handles the
darker aspects of the story—ghosts, superstition, even murder—with
equal skill." --Publishers Weekly
"An offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of legend."
–Time
"Mrs. Dermout, in the manner of Thoreau and the early Hemingway, is
an extraordinary sensualist. But her approach is not the muzzy,
semi-poetic one in which the writer damagingly affixes his own
imagination to what he sees. Instead, her instinct for beauty
results, again and again, in passages of a startling, unadorned,
three-dimensional clarity; often one can almost touch what she
describes." –Whitney Balliett, The New Yorker
"Beautiful and eerie" -–The Atlantic
"I might add that the books we return to are informed by
potencies—those objects that illumine the text and our own
memories. I am thinking of Maria Dermout’s magical The Ten Thousand
Things." –Rikki Ducornet, novelist
"This [The Ten Thousand Things] is a beautiful book. What’s
curious, you get the tone that makes you recognize that Michael
Ondaatje is part of a culture, not simply a singular writer; he's
part of a whole way of seeing reality." –Robert Creeley
"A son murdered by the head-hunters of Ceram. Three ghost-sisters
playing on an empty beach. The curiosity cabinet and its contents.
As the story circles on itself, they number in the thousands, so
that anything once loved is eternal, beautiful, unchanged." –Linda
Spalding, in Lost Classics
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