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Her first novel, the sensual coming-of-age drama Days Before Yesterday was published in 1951 and subsequently translated into several languages. The Ten Thousand Things came out in 1955 and found a readership in over ten languages. Dermoût’s modest but exceptional and enduring oeuvre continues to inspire. In her 2012 autobiographical bestseller Wild, Cheryl Strayed describes how Dermoût’s words kept her going on her rite-of-passage hike along the Pacific Crest Trail.

About the Author

Maria Dermoût

Living with her parents in a large, white house near a sugar plantation, she adores the tales told by her servant Oerip, which are permeated with the mysterious atmosphere of the Orient. One day her uncle and aunt pay a visit and she finds herself falling in love for the first time. At the same time, a new age is beginning; paradise is becoming a thing of the past.The book was written at a historical turning point between the colonial regime and the emergence of an independent nation. Amid the upheavals, Riek tries to preserve her love for the landscape of her youth, but in the end she has no choice but to leave: ‘She would need time to lose it all.’

Mrs. Dermoût, in the manner of Thoreau and the early Hemingway, is an extraordinary sensualist. Her instinct for beauty results, again and again, in passages of a startling, unadorned, threedimensional clarity; often one can almost touch what she describes.

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Nog pas gisteren

Evoking bygone days, putting memories into words that bring a lost world within reach, Maria Dermoût is in full command of the art of storytelling. She made her debut with 'Days Before Yesterday', which tells the simple story of a Dutch girl growing up in Java.

Days Before Yesterday

When Felicia is sent away to be educated in the Netherlands as a young girl, her grandmother gives her a bracelet, ‘This is for you. Make sure you come back with it.’ Felicia does exactly that. She returns with her son and without a husband to the remote island in the Dutch East Indies where her grandmother still lives. There Felicia finds herself wedded to an uncanny and dangerous world, full of mystery and violence, where objects tell tales, the dead come and go, and the past is as potent as the future.Felicia’s son falls in love with a woman who already has a child and he joins the army, only to have his life cruelly cut short.Even in her grief, Felicia continues to believe in her grandmother’s simple wisdom: see the beauty, see the ten thousand things around you.

Mrs. Dermoût, 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.

Dermoût interweaves the various elements of her subtle novel to over- whelming effect: there is something intrinsically Asian about her mesmeric style and powerful use of repetition. Events are told and retold from differing perspectives, since that is how human beings learn about themselves and the world.At the end of the novel, Felicia sits alone on her veranda. She does this one day each year, to meet her departed loved ones, to talk with them and to try to come to terms with the brutal death of her son. Her servants call her inside as evening falls. ‘Then the lady of the Small Garden whose name was Felicia stood up from her chair obediently and without looking around at the inner bay in the moonlight – it would remain there, always – she went with them, under the trees and indoors, to drink her cup of coffee and try again to go on living.’

Maria Dermoût has done something better than any other Dutch writer before or since: as non-Indonesian she has given voice to that country, depicted the nature of its peoples, and illustrated their diverse cultures.

Each of Dermoût’s sentences came at me like a soft knowing dagger, depicting a far-off land that felt to me like the blood of all the places I used to love.’

An offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of legend.

De tienduizend dingen

A consummate stylist, Maria Dermoût is renowned for leaving her readers with final sentences that resonate with hope and consolation. She invests her characters with strength and self-awareness, in the full knowledge that while life can be unjust it is still worth living, and she writes in prose so sensual and vivid that you can almost inhabit the world she describes.

The Ten Thousand Things

More Maria Dermoût

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