Maria Dermout

In Wild, Cheryl Strayed writes of The Ten Thousand Things: "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.” And it's true, The Ten Thousand Things is at once novel of shimmering strangeness—and familiarity. It is the story of Felicia, who returns with her baby son from Holland to the Spice Islands of Indonesia, to the house and garden that were her birthplace, over which her powerful grandmother still presides. 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 present. First published in Holland in 1955, Maria Dermoût's novel was immediately recognized as a magical work, like nothing else Dutch—or European—literature had seen before. The Ten Thousand Things is an entranced vision of a far-off place that is as convincingly real and intimate as it is exotic, a book that is at once a lament and an ecstatic ode to nature and life.

The Ten Thousand Things

Fraser Simons

https://medium.com/springboard-though...

“we all die…and we receive nothing for nothing.”

A Danish-Indonesian author, Maria Dermoût’s 1955 Danish classic is unlike most anything in the Western canon — which is exactly what makes it so valuable.

Felicia embarks from Holland to return home to the Spice Islands of Indonesia with her infant son after her husband abandons them because the money from the family sugar business dries up.

“Past the three graves, the path suddenly went steeply up into the hills, hills without many high trees, open and sunny, overgrown with thick yellowish grass that smelled of herbs, and full of wild rosebushes. And from there, over the tops of the trees, over the house and the outbuildings, she could see the inner bay — like a round blue lake, with here and there light-green discolorings where the water was shallow and dark-green ones where it was very deep, around it the white ridge of the surf and all the luxuriant green of the coast.”

The masterful introduction of the island to the reader with an entire chapter of prose dedicated to the physical features and locations and nature of the place is staggering. Then Felecia’s return, her memories, the growth of her son (and his story), random stories of the few murders that have occurred, and the subsequent tying together of all these disparate threads.

Her homecoming brings with it an unexpected flood of memories from her childhood — specifically her grandmother — which are interwoven into the narrative of her return such that it is sometimes unclear when the events are taken place.

‘“Are you listening to the bay? You are so silent, granddaughter — three waves behind each other — the father, the mother, the child, they say here, can you hear it?” and the old woman repeated it once more with the waves.’

It then shifts to focus on the process of Felecia reintegrating with the culture of the islands and her grandmother and the garden and home of her childhood; eventually, she is shown to grow as old and as consolidated into the island as her grandmother. Uncannily, to the point where she almost becomes her grandmother, as far as the island is concerned.

The prose is as vivid as I’ve ever read. Playful and flighty, and a bit strange, especially in cadence. Even when it meanders it is still has a wonderful flow to it and baroque prose that make consumption easy. Later it becomes apparent that these wanderings are not as listless as they appear.

“A day in the radiant sunlight and the sky’s blue, in the shadow of a proud dark sail, over rustling waves, along new coastlines, wouldn’t that help to get past sadness? for a while, for that one day at least.”

In just 206 pages The Ten Thousand Things has a structure that tricks the reader into getting a complete, complex picture of the island, as it pertains to Felecia. Her feelings about her garden and home and the island itself informs how she interacts with those people who have been killed on it.
Grief, to her, is externalized in an interesting way.

Though still an internal process, depending on what you assume is ‘real’ or not, the people who have died become specters that visit her garden. She senses them, sometimes interacts with them. Each may be a dialogue Felecia expounds upon as she talks to them and remembers them. This lends the fiction a magical realism quality.

“Felicia had never seen such beads before, neither of glass nor of metal, not of jade either, she thought; of stone or baked clay, rather, opaque, in mysteriously tender and quenched colors: orange ocher, golden brown, some touched with black; so subdued of hue — melancholy almost, as if there was something of autumn in that little box woven from leaves, something of passing and dying.”

What would be deemed as superstition in Western culture is instead shown as to be both an internal and external force that is symbiotic with the island and the inhabitants, legitimizing it; to the point where distinguishing something that might appear strange from any other social contract or ritual that has credence in other cultures is impossible, and decoupling it from any other facet of a person’s lived experience would delegitimize the entirety of the life.

Even as Dermoût writes about prejudice and racism and death and murder she also provides a framework and scaffolding for humanizing a culture and person so they cannot be legitimately minimized and dismissed. A pretty astounding achievement.

…they weren’t a hundred things but much more than a hundred, and now only hers, a hundred times “a hundred things,” next to each other, separate from each other, touching, here and there flowing into each other, without any link anywhere, and at the same time linked forever…a link which she did not quite understand, understanding it was not needed, wasn’t possible, she had seen it — for one moment over the moonlit water.

The Ten Thousand Things

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