What an Old Lady Knows

THE TEN THOUSAND THINGS (244 pp.) --Maria Dermouf--Simon & Schusfer ($3.75).

In 1955 Holland saw a first novel by a Dutch lady of 67. Her writer's stock in trade was elementary--just a bagful of old memories. Yet with them she managed to fashion a book whose style owes nothing to other writers, whose substance is the stuff of a faraway East Indies setting both languorous and violent. In translation, Maria Dermout's The Ten Thousand Things is an uncommon reading experience, an offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of legend. Sybille Bedford, another late-starting, first-rate first novelist (TIME, Feb. n, 1957), has put it well: "Someone who knows something worth knowing has written this book."

What is it, in this book, that Maria Dermout knows? Born in Java on a sugar plantation, she lived for 27 years on many islands in what was then an opulent Dutch Indian Eden. Her children and grandchildren were born there. The look, sounds, smells of jungle and sea seem to have penetrated her consciousness. The deep differences between native and white, between servant and master, are effortlessly established as both subtle and decisive. And underneath the light garment of Christianity or Mohammedanism worn by the natives, there is the steadily discernible play of a fundamental superstition.

The Dutch heroine's name is Felicia. Born in the lovely Moluccas, she leads a little-girl existence that is bounded by her mother's plantation wealth, the easygoing indifference of an indulgent father, the dark, lush presence of jungle, and the wonderful attentions of an old grandmother whose respect for native superstitions colors the child's impressions. Her parents take her off to Europe after a senseless family quarrel with the old lady. She marries a charming, worthless fellow who leaves her, and she comes back to the island, as the old grandmother knew she would, with her infant son.

Manless, always hoping that her husband will come back, Felicia plunges into plantation work and gradually she gives up all pretense at social life. When her son is killed by the arrow of a savage tribesman, nothing is left for Felicia but the daily round, the deepening identification with the island's character, a contemplation of past and present, tinged with a lonely woman's resentment.

Coexisting with barely concealed native primitivism is the specter of violence. Even among these easygoing people, murders are not rare. Author Dermout describes three of them, in short stories not too successfully interpolated to flesh out her book, but each one in itself a tale of dark fascination. Only at the end of the book, and late in life, does Felicia realize that life is action, and that even those who are murdered are really "killed in action."

The Ten Thousand Things are the fragments that make up life's substance, and to go on living, however maddeningly arranged the fragments may be. is itself a valid action. Spelled out against the rich, colorful background that Author Dermout knows so well and handles so effectively, this is an affirmation that emerges with an oddly insistent, compelling effect.

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