The Ten Thousand Things by Maria Dermout

A lullaby for the child, or a story sung to it, battle songs of the wild Alfuras, head-hunters of Ceram.  And sometimes, very rarely, the old heathen lament (careful, don't let the schoolteacher hear it) for one who has just died.  "The hundred things" was the name of the lament--the hundred things of which the dead is reminded, which are asked him, told him.

Maria Dermout's The Ten Thousand Things is--digressively, elliptically--the story of Felicia, a Dutch woman who returns to the deteriorating spice plantation owned by her family in Indonesia, where her grandmother still lives.  For Felicia, like all people I suppose, returning to the place of her childhood brings a rush of recognitions that are like shocks: her grandmother's collection of shells and curiosities, guarded by crawly mollusks she keeps in the cabinets as "sentinels," the winged boats called proas moving on the water, the ruin of the original house, the three little graves of the little girls supposedly murdered.  It's so affecting that she begins to lose a sense of herself, having to remind herself that she is Felicia, and not her grandmother, who once returned this way.  In turn, she imagines her son Himpies (lol) returning to the plantation one day and having the same experience:

She thought, she had never before thought that--in the light and the rustle and the small movement of the proa--repetition, repetition, nothing but repetitions linked to one another.  Again and again the same, and again and once more.

Himpies does have that experience, returning to the "Small Garden" after years away in the Dutch military, but the expected repetitions are cut short by his murder, on a nearby island, at the hands of a native tribe.  Death stalls the sense of repetition and return, which was never anything but a myth, and Felicia grows into something of a lonely eminence on the island, respected for presiding over a little plot full of ghosts.

From there the book gets weird, at least structurally speaking.  It abandons Felicia to tell four stories that are seemingly unrelated, though they take place on the same island: the story of a professor of botany who enlists the services of a young Javanese man and is later murdered by local islanders, of Constance, a beautiful woman murdered under mysterious circumstances, of a military commissioner murdered under mysterious circumstances--okay, maybe they're not that unrelated.

The title of the book comes from a traditional song called the "hundred things," in which the dying recites--or has recited to them?--a list of things they remember from life.  These objects, like the curiosities in Felicia's grandmother's cabinet, anchor them to life and give substance to what passes away.  Dermout's amendment of the phrase is meant to suggest the futility of expressing a life in a mere hundred, that if we were really to give the dead a proper lament the list would be hyperbolically large, perhaps endless.  The book brings its various threads together at the end when Felicia is visited by the various murdered: the professor, the commissioner, Constance, her son, the three little girls.  She realizes that the murderers must join the murdered also, and her vision enacts a kind of detente between the two that the regular course of life made impossible.

Where is colonialism in this story?  Felicia, while down on her luck, comes from an old spice merchant family that colonized Indonesia.  (It's this fact that makes her imagining a permanent cycle of abandon and return spurious to begin with.)  I liked the ripe character tension between the ruffled, affable professor and the wary Javanese especially.  The professor means no harm and treats his assistant well, but it's hard to blame the assistant for his wariness.  He resists and resists the professor's friendly claim on him--"He did not want a bond between them, not of one kind nor of the other"--but is unable to escape, and that seems as good a metaphor for the relationship between European and Indonesian as any.  The professor, working from a Javanese story, crafts a version of the colonial enterprise as a kind of fruitless searching:

"All of us, always, when we're young, have to hold something for those who are old, and we drop it and want to get away, and draw a ship in the sand to reach a new country, and we always forget the ballast--there is no ballast but the earth of the old country--and the new country's earth is always just as heavy as the old country's--and for that, then, we have left and crossed the seas and might even have drowned on the way, in deep water, or grown old and in our turn let someone hold a basin up for us..."

And yet the claim to universalism here--we all feel this way--seems as false to me as it does to the Javanese assistant.  Many of the dead were murdered by locals: the mountain tribesman who killed Himpies, the seafaring tribe that killed the professor, the slave that killed the three little Dutch girls.  Felicia's vision of the murderers and murdered brought together at last might serve also as a vision of a kind of global healing, but how would we read this scene if the slave girl were reunited not with the girls she murdered but the man who enslaved her?

The Ten Thousand Things is lyrical and sensuous, often bewildering, frequently clever, and often very touching.  As Brent notes in his review, the novel ends with Felicia having to get up from her communion from the dead and go on living.  Here Dermout suggests that it's life, not death, that's really tragic, but also that perhaps it doesn't have to be.