Maria Dermoût (1888–1962)
Author of The Ten Thousand Things
About the Author
Works by Maria Dermoût
De juwelen haarkam 8 copies
De kist en enige verhalen 8 copies
Donker van uiterlijk 7 copies
Spel van tifa-gongs 3 copies
Puteri Pulau 3 copies
Zo luidt het verhaal 3 copies
Toetie : verhalen 1 copy
Associated Works
De Nederlandse en Vlaamse literatuur vanaf 1880 in 250 verhalen (2005) — Contributor — 79 copies, 2 reviews
De Nederlandse en Vlaamse literatuur vanaf 1880 in 60 lange verhalen (2006) — Contributor — 43 copies, 2 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Dermoût, Maria
- Legal name
- Dermoût-Ingermann, Helena Antonia Maria Elisabeth
- Birthdate
- 1888-06-15
- Date of death
- 1962-06-27
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- novelist
short story writer - Relationships
- Freriks, Kester (biographer)
- Short biography
- Maria Dermoût, née Ingermann, was born on a sugar plantation in Java in the colonial Dutch East Indies -- now Indonesia -- and sent to the Netherlands at age 11 for her education. In 1907, she married Isaac Dermoût, a civil servant in the judiciary, with whom she had children, and returned with him to the Indies. They spent the next 30 years living in (as she later wrote) "every town and wilderness of the islands of Java, Celebes, and the Moluccas" for her husband's postings. Maria Dermoût did not focus on her writing until after her husband's retirement, when the couple returned to the Netherlands and settled in The Hague. At age 63, she made her publishing debut with the story-memoir Days Before Yesterday (1951). Her celebrated novel The Ten Thousand Things was published in 1955 and became a bestseller. Maria Dermoût produced a total of seven volumes, two of which appeared posthumously. A number of her short stories were translated and published in magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
- Nationality
- Netherlands
- Birthplace
- Pekalongan, Java, Dutch East Indies
- Places of residence
- Pekalongan, Java, Dutch East Indies (birth|now Indonesia)
Noordwijk, Netherlands (death) - Place of death
- The Hague, Netherlands
- Burial location
- Algemene Begraafplaats, Noordwijk, Netherlands
- Associated Place (for map)
- Netherlands
Members
Reviews
This book was outstanding. I literally could hardly put it down. I read it in two sittings! This author does not describe things, she paints you a clear and vivid picture. You are not an observer of the island, you are there. You are not hearing of the characters, you know them intimately. Just when you think she has taken you on to another story, she brings it all together and ties them together with a neat little piece of sea grass. You shiver with the foreshadowing. You rebuke, but show more forgive. You mourn and empathize. Your heart fills with understanding. And in the end, you reluctantly put the book down and "try to go on living." show less
Several years ago, I read Dermoût’s best-known work, The Ten Thousand Things. That book contained a series of interconnected stories about life in Indonesia in the early 20th century and I concluded that it was “astonishingly evocative of a time and place, wonderfully lyrical, (dismayingly) short, and a true pleasure to read.” Dermoût (1888-1962) was an “Indo”—a child of Dutch parents born and raised in Indonesia. She wrote The Ten Thousand Things when she was 67. Yesterday is show more her first work—also a thinly disguised memoir of growing up in a certain time and place—written when she was 63. This work also relies on nostalgia and, though I enjoyed it very much, it didn’t move me as much as The Ten Thousand Things. Still, both books are very successful at evoking her love of place. She is particularly good at observing plants and wildlife, local culture (both Dutch colonial and indigenous), and she has a knack for describing a way of life by painting exceptional portraits of people and their relationships. show less
The trouble began with words, really.
No longer was something a thing in essence. For neither world nor time has the patience for lists of reinvention, a praxis on praxis where the slightest shift required a churning and blooming of sui generis for that one birth, that one core. World and time, so long as human muddies up the lines in hasty life and mortal unease, needs condense.
But also stretch, for both world and time are vast unknowns dripping with fragrant allurements for the passing show more human, all too prone to settling and all too weak in the face of fate and its realities. And when world and time carry their different settlers across one another, oh. The madness of reconciliation. Love, religion, colonialism. Death, murder, headhunting. A paradise bound in poison, sweet for the ones who suckle on the strains of sugar and blood. Too complex.
Too beautiful, you mean. Too beautiful? Beauty in the failed effort to save a life, yes yes. Beauty in the jewels and shells and cultured stone, yes yes. Beauty in the pace of living with everyone in their place, yes yes. Beauty in the mizzen sails, small and sailing jewels across in fluttered thousands, across the blue and green and boundless light of ocean bright, yes yes. But, poison in their trailing tips. Ah, so no poison. Then. Beauty in a mass-murderer crying over the unsaved death? Beauty in the cultured stone torn from graves? Beauty in the buying and selling of fellow humanity? Beauty so long as all, say, good? Then, tell, what is beauty?
Humans and their words and easy consolidations. Love the rich sheen of garnered wealth, loathe the merchant in their different faith. Feel passionate in the pursuit of knowledge in the purest form, feel uneasiness in the presence of an expert and all their foreign trappings. Cherish the murdered son bred on the gains of slavery and exploitation, condemn the murderer fulfilling the honorable traditions of their people. Incorporate with ease the culture of the outsiders around you to your liking, reject with ease the rest. Is that it?
Good with evil? Evil with good? Too mixed and murky, to go by such labels that no one can come to terms or to grips with, each breaking off with their own nature fitted with whatever nurturing comes to them by fact and fortune of birth. Too complicated when far off peoples come into contact with one another and find fascination, one with the other, but also fear. And always, always the other.
Better to stick with more concrete terms. Life, and its goings. Death, and its copings. A tiny jellyfish with its venom sting, a luscious island with its haunted grounds, a day of murdered and murderers bound by whatever attractive light led them on to their dooms. No matter the means or misconceptions, there is the end of an existence, and those who continue on. On with remembrance, on with ghosts, on with a single word that, perhaps, has some use in all these muddled and one-and-the-other of all this inexplicable happenings of such exquisite sorrow and horrendous attraction.
Grief. Yes. Avoid all reconciliation, all intersection, all encounters with something both self and other, and still the living have their dead. There, the hand is forced, the die is cast, and the rest of words fade back into incomprehensible graspings. One hundred things, ten thousand things, whatever is enough, is enough. And there, within all those number of things, lies the disparate cords of humanity and all its discordant strains across world and time, woven into, what?
What else?
No longer was something a thing in essence. For neither world nor time has the patience for lists of reinvention, a praxis on praxis where the slightest shift required a churning and blooming of sui generis for that one birth, that one core. World and time, so long as human muddies up the lines in hasty life and mortal unease, needs condense.
But also stretch, for both world and time are vast unknowns dripping with fragrant allurements for the passing show more human, all too prone to settling and all too weak in the face of fate and its realities. And when world and time carry their different settlers across one another, oh. The madness of reconciliation. Love, religion, colonialism. Death, murder, headhunting. A paradise bound in poison, sweet for the ones who suckle on the strains of sugar and blood. Too complex.
Too beautiful, you mean. Too beautiful? Beauty in the failed effort to save a life, yes yes. Beauty in the jewels and shells and cultured stone, yes yes. Beauty in the pace of living with everyone in their place, yes yes. Beauty in the mizzen sails, small and sailing jewels across in fluttered thousands, across the blue and green and boundless light of ocean bright, yes yes. But, poison in their trailing tips. Ah, so no poison. Then. Beauty in a mass-murderer crying over the unsaved death? Beauty in the cultured stone torn from graves? Beauty in the buying and selling of fellow humanity? Beauty so long as all, say, good? Then, tell, what is beauty?
Humans and their words and easy consolidations. Love the rich sheen of garnered wealth, loathe the merchant in their different faith. Feel passionate in the pursuit of knowledge in the purest form, feel uneasiness in the presence of an expert and all their foreign trappings. Cherish the murdered son bred on the gains of slavery and exploitation, condemn the murderer fulfilling the honorable traditions of their people. Incorporate with ease the culture of the outsiders around you to your liking, reject with ease the rest. Is that it?
Good with evil? Evil with good? Too mixed and murky, to go by such labels that no one can come to terms or to grips with, each breaking off with their own nature fitted with whatever nurturing comes to them by fact and fortune of birth. Too complicated when far off peoples come into contact with one another and find fascination, one with the other, but also fear. And always, always the other.
Better to stick with more concrete terms. Life, and its goings. Death, and its copings. A tiny jellyfish with its venom sting, a luscious island with its haunted grounds, a day of murdered and murderers bound by whatever attractive light led them on to their dooms. No matter the means or misconceptions, there is the end of an existence, and those who continue on. On with remembrance, on with ghosts, on with a single word that, perhaps, has some use in all these muddled and one-and-the-other of all this inexplicable happenings of such exquisite sorrow and horrendous attraction.
Grief. Yes. Avoid all reconciliation, all intersection, all encounters with something both self and other, and still the living have their dead. There, the hand is forced, the die is cast, and the rest of words fade back into incomprehensible graspings. One hundred things, ten thousand things, whatever is enough, is enough. And there, within all those number of things, lies the disparate cords of humanity and all its discordant strains across world and time, woven into, what?
What else?
"Rumphius says that they're quite beautiful."show less
"Yes," said the officer, "a strange poisonous green, with long blue streamers, and the sails are sort of transparent with a coloured edge."
"A crystal sail edged with purple or violet."
"Yes," the officer agreed, a bit astonished.
"Like a jewel, Rumphius said."
"Yes," there was a flicker of enthusiasm in the blue eyes, "yes, that's true!"
Glorious, someone said.
And Suprapto continued, " I guess the sails aren't very big–"
"Now, how could they be big? Without the streamers these jellyfish aren't big themselves–the sails aren't bigger than–" the officer looked around for something to compare them with: his own firm hand, and then the slim dark hand which the Javanese held on his knee. He didn't touch it, but he pointed at it, his fingers moving under the knuckles, "a bit larger than the width of your hand perhaps."
Suprapto looked where the other had pointed–his own thin hand.
"Yes," he said in his even, toneless voice, "I realized that those sails are small–not big,"
For a short moment it caused him an almost inhuman pain.
This is quite simply one of the most beautifully written books I've ever read. I am not usually a person for whom excellent writing can compensate for a scant plot (and it must be admitted that the plot of The Ten Thousand Things is slight and slow-moving); however, Dermoût's prose kept me hooked in a way that is, for me, unprecedented. I wanted to keep reading this book, not to find out what happened, but simply to be reading. I wanted to wallow in it, to make it last. I am sure there are show more people who always read that way. Myself, I am usually racing through, wanting to know, impatient for events to unfold. I often catch myself skimming or skipping entire paragraphs or even pages in my thirst for plot (which, incidentally, is also probably why I enjoy rereading so much: there is always something I missed the first time through). With this book I slowed down. I read and savored every word. And every word seemed worth savoring, each one carefully chosen, each sentence constructed like a work of art.
It's mesmerizing: every time I dipped back into the book to try to find quotes to illustrate what I mean, I ended up just reading on from wherever I started. This is writing like an enchantment. You start to read and you are bespelled: you forget what you were doing and why. You want only to keep reading.
This is part of a longer review published on my blog, Around the World in 2000 Books. show less
It's mesmerizing: every time I dipped back into the book to try to find quotes to illustrate what I mean, I ended up just reading on from wherever I started. This is writing like an enchantment. You start to read and you are bespelled: you forget what you were doing and why. You want only to keep reading.
This is part of a longer review published on my blog, Around the World in 2000 Books. show less
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 14
- Also by
- 7
- Members
- 759
- Popularity
- #33,503
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 24
- ISBNs
- 28
- Languages
- 4
- Favorited
- 2
