{"product_id":"the-ten-thousand-things-isbn-9781590170137","title":"The Ten Thousand Things","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eWild\u003c\/i\u003e, Cheryl Strayed writes of \u003ci\u003eThe Ten Thousand Things\u003c\/i\u003e: \"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, \u003ci\u003eThe Ten Thousand Things\u003c\/i\u003e 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. \u003ci\u003eThe Ten Thousand Things\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003c\/p\u003e“Fans of magic realism will be thrilled to discover a long out-of-print Dutch classic...Dermout  writes exquisitely and hauntingly of murder and loss, tolerance, and fear of “the  other.” --\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"Dermoût beautifully depicts the idyllic setting and handles  the darker aspects of the story—ghosts, superstition, even murder—with equal skill.\"  --\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \"An offbeat narrative that has the timeless tone of legend.\"  –\u003ci\u003eTime \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\"Mrs. Dermout, in the manner of Thoreau and the early Hemingway, is an extraordinary  sensualist. But her approach is not the muzzy, semi-poetic one in which the writer  damagingly affixes his own imagination to what he sees. Instead, her instinct for  beauty results, again and again, in passages of a startling, unadorned, three-dimensional  clarity; often one can almost touch what she describes.\" –Whitney Balliett, \u003ci\u003eThe New  Yorker \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\"Beautiful and eerie\" -\u003ci\u003e–The Atlantic \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\"I might add that the books we return  to are informed by potencies—those objects that illumine the text and our own memories.  I am thinking of Maria Dermout’s magical \u003ci\u003eThe Ten Thousand Things.\u003c\/i\u003e\" –Rikki Ducornet,  novelist \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"This [\u003ci\u003eThe Ten Thousand Things\u003c\/i\u003e] is a beautiful book. What’s curious, you  get the tone that makes you recognize that Michael Ondaatje is part of a culture,  not simply a singular writer; he's part of a whole way of seeing reality.\" –Robert  Creeley \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \"A son murdered by the head-hunters of Ceram. Three ghost-sisters playing  on an empty beach. The curiosity cabinet and its contents. As the story circles on  itself, they number in the thousands, so that anything once loved is eternal, beautiful,  unchanged.\" –Linda Spalding, in \u003ci\u003eLost Classics \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eMaria Dermoût \u003c\/b\u003e(1888-1962) was born on a sugar plantation in the Dutch  East Indies and educated in Holland. She then returned to the Indies  with her husband, a jurist, and spent thirty years living in, she later  wrote, “every town and wilderness of the islands of Java, Celebes, and  the Moluccas.” In 1951, at the age of sixty-three, Dermoût published her  first book, a memoir called \u003ci\u003eYesterday\u003c\/i\u003e. Her celebrated novel \u003ci\u003eThe Ten Thousand Things\u003c\/i\u003e was published in 1955.     \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eHans Koning\u003c\/b\u003e, born Hans Koningsberger in Amsterdam, came  to this country in 1951 and established himself as an American writer in  1958 with his first novel, \u003ci\u003eThe Affair\u003c\/i\u003e. Among his other novels are \u003ci\u003eA Walk with Love and Death, The Petersburg Cannes Express, The Kleber Flight\u003c\/i\u003e, and, most recently, \u003ci\u003eZeeland, or Elective Concurrences\u003c\/i\u003e.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302508876005,"sku":"NP9781590170137","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781590170137.jpg?v=1767741808","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-ten-thousand-things-isbn-9781590170137","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}