Word: authority
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Maria Dermout is a little old (71) Dutch lady who remembers the life she led in Java before the European was seriously challenged, a time long ago when all daddies were rich and most mammas were good-looking. When Author Dermout's first book. The Ten Thousand Things, showed up in the U.S. last year (TIME. March 3). it seemed too good to be true: an I-remember-I-remember exercise in graceful recollection that almost never stumbled into teary nostalgia. Her second book simply proves once again that no art is so sweet as artlessness, no truth...
...central character, a little girl named Rick, leads much the same kind of life that Author Dermout herself knew...
...know their background of overriding superstition in which native magic is more powerful than any white man's god. They obey their masters and know their masters' weaknesses. Their own lives encompass an area to which the white folks have no pass, and it is one of Author Dermout's virtues that she can suggest this life without dragging the reader through kitchens and bedrooms. There is a story of sorts. The small girl, with the awareness of the very young, sees a disastrous love affair founder, and she watches as white and native lives run courses...
...Thousand Things, it is not the facts of life that matter so much in Yesterday as the fact of life. Author Dermout can tell much of what needs to be told about Javanese servants by catching them in moments of tenderness or bitterness when their blank-faced defenses are down. Best of all, she can describe a life no longer possible without resorting to plantation tears. Yesterday is offered as a bit of fiction. It does not matter how it is read, as imagination or autobiography; the best thing about this book is the fact that the reader is almost...
...mold as George Washington's bronze horse, and his problems, one would think, could hardly be more trying than shooing away the pigeons of circumstance-tax collectors, importunate beauties, photographers wanting to capture his grandeur in whisky ads. Yet Parmelee broods, and it is a credit to the author that readers are persuaded to take it seriously...