Word: dermo
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...land or in water. From Portland to Morehead City, N.C., fishermen have been hauling up lobsters and crabs with gaping holes in their shells and fish with rotted fins and ulcerous lesions. Last year's oyster haul in Chesapeake Bay was the worst ever; the crop was decimated by dermo, a fungal disease, and the baffling syndrome MSX (multinucleate sphere...
...THOUSAND THINGS, by Maria Dermoût. Dutch Author Dermoût was 67 when she wrote her first novel. Locale: a strange world she intimately knew-the islands of Indonesia. Curious, bathed in memory and completely original, the book merges white and native existence in beautiful language, washes against the senses like an insistent tropical swell...
What is it, in this book, that Maria Dermoût knows? Born in Java on a sugar plantation, she lived for 27 years on many islands in what was then an opulent Dutch Indian Eden. Her children and grandchildren were born there. The look, sounds, smells of jungle and sea seem to have penetrated her consciousness. The deep differences between native and white, between servant and master, are effortlessly established as both subtle and decisive. And underneath the light garment of Christianity or Mohammedanism worn by the natives, there is the steadily discernible play of a fundamental superstition...
Coexisting with barely concealed native primitivism is the specter of violence. Even among these easygoing people, murders are not rare. Author Dermoût describes three of them, in short stories not too successfully interpolated to flesh out her book, but each one in itself a tale of dark fascination. Only at the end of the book, and late in life, does Felicia realize that life is action, and that even those who are murdered are really "killed in action...
...Thousand Things are the fragments that make up life's substance, and to go on living, however maddeningly arranged the fragments may be. is itself a valid action. Spelled out against the rich, colorful background that Author Dermoût knows so well and handles so effectively, this is an affirmation that emerges with an oddly insistent, compelling effect...