The literature of the Netherlands attracts far less attention than
its renowned art, and the literature of the former colony of the
Dutch East Indies, the present Republic of Indonesia, is even less
well known. A Different Magic represents the annual De
Vries/Vander Kooy Memorial Lecture presented by E.M. Beekman at
the University of Michigan on 28 October 1999.
Beekman links G.E. Rumphius, “the blind seer of Ambon,”
with the fiction of Maria Dermoût, both treasures of Dutch
colonial literature. Some years ago many American readers were pleasantly
surprised by Dermoût’s extraordinary work, The Ten
Thousand Things. Beekman points out the delicate appreciation
of tropical nature that Dermoût learned from Rumphius. She
borrowed a large number of details and subtleties from him in order
to weave a vision of the natural and supernatural worlds.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
E.M. Beekman is professor of
Germanic languages at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
He is a scholar and translator of Dutch colonial literature. He
has published 24 books on a variety of subjects, including Georgius
Everhardus Rumphius, The Ambonese Curiosity Cabinet and
Troubled Pleasures, Studies in Dutch Colonial Literature for the
East Indies 1600-1950.
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