The Ten Thousand Things – Maria Dermoût (tr. Hans Koning)

Maria Dermoût’s novel The Ten Thousand Things was one of those books about which I knew absolutely nothing. It was a sort of dark horse in the #NYRBWomen23 reading project, but one which I ended up loving.

A novel of “shimmering strangeness” as aptly described by the blurb at the back of this NYRB edition, the first chapter in Maria Dermoût’s magical and enigmatic The Ten Thousand Things reverberates with a mesmeric, otherworldly quality as we are transported to the verdant, exotic spice islands of Indonesia called the Moluccas. This chapter is a masterclass in scene setting, conveying a dazzling sense of place, a fascinating blend of myth with reality where the wonders of the island are as fascinating as the evils that lurk within it.

Ghosts haunt this mountainous island strewn with fantastically shaped rocks; in the garden at the outer bay we are told of how “a drowned man walked” close to the town, while in the garden at the inner bay, the apparitions of three girls (“they had been the daughters of her (our heroine’s) great-great-grandfather”) are repeatedly seen but left to themselves. We are told of “the man with the blue hair”, the coral woman, and other strange people on the island as well as the “old heathen lament” called “the hundred things” which is a sort of reminder to the dead. We hear of the “Lady of the Small Garden” – a woman now in her fifties with no family having lost her son quite young and no other family to speak of, and this is none other than our protagonist, Felicia.

She herself had been grievously tried in life: her grand-mother dead, to whom she owed everything; both her parents they had never cared much about her; brothers and sisters she did not have; her husband – nobody knew the real story of that husband: “A big man,” they said, but no one knew him, he had never been on the island, he must have died years and years ago; and now not so long ago her son too, her only child.

So she had no one left.

Felicia, herself, performs an odd ritual whereby every year she dedicates one day and one night to the dead, more precisely to the murdered, the significance of which becomes clearer in the latter half of the book.

She wasn’t an oversensitive woman and certainly not sentimental, but she would always keep that deep and burning pity for those who had been murdered; she rebelled against it, murder, she couldn’t accept it…

FELICIA AND FAMILY

Felicia in many ways is the pulse of the novel and a dominant presence in the second section titled “At the Inner Bay”. We learn of her childhood years on the island, particularly in the Small Garden where she was also born. She is named Felicia by her headstrong mother, a name her father also agrees to but not her grandmother. Thus, in a matter of a few lines, we learn that Felicia’s grandmother and mother don’t get along, while the father is a relatively docile man who tolerates his wife’s tantrums.

Felicia’s mother comes from a rich family, a family that has reaped fortunes from owning sugar plantations in Java. With this advantage of wealth comes a firm determination to live life on her terms. Thus, with the mother refusing to stay in the grandmother’s house in the Small Garden, the family lives separately in their own house in the town at the outer bay.

The grandmother, meanwhile, is a woman of the island, immersed in the preservation of its traditions and at ease with its ways of living. Adorned in attire stitched from silk, batiste, and lace, she is as adept at making medicines, amber balls, and scents as she is at cooking and communicating with the island’s inhabitants. In an environment steeped in folklore and superstitions, the house in the Small Garden is not without its marvels either; an item of notable interest is a curiosities cabinet that has a special drawer filled with a collection of unique treasures – a piece of old coloured Palembang silk, a pretty fan of real tortoise with gold inlay, gold pins, brooches, pendants, a shell with a silver edge, a gold apple carved out of fretwork and so on. But more importantly, we learn of the Carbuncle stone “which a certain kind of snake wore in its forehead and which gave a red glow in the dark”, valuable only if it was gifted (it could not be traded, bought or sold).

Felicia’s early memories of the island are happy ones, but soon a major disagreement between her mother and grandmother becomes the first turning point in how her subsequent life pans out. The bone of contention between the two women is a dilapidated family house, which the mother wishes to renovate and for which she has ambitious plans, turning it into a sumptuous home filled with antique furniture, crystal chandeliers, and a haven for grand parties with music, candlelight, and guests arriving in ceremonial proas. The grandmother, vehemently, opposes it – to her, that house is mired in bad luck and misfortune at the centre of which are the three little girls whose ghosts prowl the island.

In the subsequent years, we get a brief sketch of Felicia and her parents moving to Europe and settling into a series of expensive hotels, Felicia’s attraction to a stranger in Nice who she will subsequently go on to marry and have a son. The couple would lead the same bohemian lifestyle like her parents living out of hotels, always funded by the mother’s “sugary money”. But when the husband abandons her just when she is pregnant with their son, and the sugar crisis in Java escalates substantially eroding her parents’ wealth, Felicia with her baby in tow decides to return to her grandmother, and to the spice gardens of the Moluccas, gearing up for new beginnings on an island she had loved as a child.

Subsequent chapters highlight Felicia’s reunion with her grandmother who helps her adapt to the island’s conventions and ways of life; Felicia’s attempts to eke a living that involve striking a balance between observing traditions while also being practical and finding means of bolstering the family’s income; her relationship with her son Himpies, who also grows up falling in love with the Small Garden and for whom she has great hopes in terms of education and knowledge.

AN OMINOUS OUTER BAY

The third section “At the Outer Bay” is a compendium of three chapters which are short stories unto themselves but also linked to the mystery and violence surrounding the island. In “The Commissioner” we learn of the secluded life led by his young wife and three elderly woman servants; the commissioner is a tyrannical man whose death is shrouded in murkiness. “Constance and the Sailor” gives an account of the titular character’s turbulent period of employment with a Dutch family who has rented Felicia’s family home in town; a story which is also replete with threats and violence, while the last story “The Professor” tells us about a European professor who teams up with an Indonesian to explore the island of the Moluccas only to succumb to a sinister fate whose perpetrators he does not take seriously.

And then comes the final section where we circle back to “The Island” and to the Small Garden, to Felicia’s world where these various elements are woven together in an offbeat although compelling way.

LANDSCAPE OF THE SENSUAL SPICE ISLANDS

Of the many things that make The Ten Thousand Things such a joy to read is the power of Dermoût’s lavish descriptions. These are not just limited to scenery – terrains splashed with a kaleidoscope of colours (greens, purples, whites, and blues) – but also include food (kanari cakes and preserves), fabrics & clothes (silks and velvets, sarongs and jackets), and the customs and culture of the place (melodious songs, rituals and dances that celebrate both the living and the dead). The gardens are luxuriant with spice trees, coconut palms, and plane trees, an assortment of flora and fauna, woods, thick forests, and transparent pools. Proas (Indonesian and Malaysian sailing boats) dot the blue waters of the bay and are the primary modes of transport, while the island echoes with the musicality of its sounds…

Sometimes the lady of the Small Garden listened to the island: how the bays rustled, the inner bay differently from the outer bay, and the open sea beyond still different again. That was the land wind sighing, and that the sea wind, and that the howl of the storm wind which is called Baratdaja.

THEMES & WRITING STYLE

A rich array of themes are on display here – the intermingling of the past with the present, the complexities of family, the tussle between the old and the new, the vestiges of colonialism, ghosts, violence, death, and the force of nature. Family dynamics are explored through Felicia, her bonds with her grandmother and her son, the textures of both relationships different, and yet whose loss she deeply feels. The shadowy legacy of colonialism is prominently explored in the outer bay chapters where the folly of the Europeans is starkly exposed in their failure to understand locals and their ways, the last chapter particularly emanates Paul Bowles vibes. Ghosts are ever-present and an accepted part of island life, the dead are respected in a ceremonial send-off, and violence unexpectedly erupts disturbing the calm and the splendour of this enchanting, dreamy place.

IN A NUTSHELL

Maria Dermout’s The Ten Thousand Things, then, is a glittering mix of stories of menace, myths, legends complete with a lush, hypnotic vista against which the individual histories of Felicia and her family are juxtaposed. These are stories seamlessly woven into a rich tapestry of love, loss, loneliness, nostalgia, and memory transforming the novel into one of immense beauty. Highly recommended!