""The Ten Thousand Things is a novel of shimmering strangeness?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 Dermo︣t'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"--Publisher's description."
"After her son is murdered by the natives, Felicia "expresses her grief in a personal ritual of remembering her son and others who have died violently on the island, including those she 'knows' only through the island's oral history. Each year she marks the deaths in an act of commemoration that becomes, finally, a celebration of life."--Jacket."
"Haar weelderige tuin op een Moluks eiland in Nederlands-Indië roept bij de eigenaresse veel gevoelens en gedachten op."