Dermout has a way of abstaining from being verbs, seldom saying “She is” or “She was”, but always “She, performing an action,” or “She, who performed an action,” always in the process of doing something, always in the middle, always a continuous ebbing and flowing. That is what makes her prose lyrical even when she describes abrupt action, like Himpies shot by the Mountain Alfura with an arrow: “he who had been gay, who liked to laugh, had been laughing when the arrow came” — had been laughing. Himpies laughs on, the arrow shoots on, the moment of death arrested by a mother’s memory.
In Part Three, each short story draws you in irresistibly and makes you pay attention to every detail. All three are incredibly well done. They are elusive stories: they ask questions but always manage to escape without giving answers. They do not like to be grasped: if you try to hold them, they evaporate. The only way to appreciate them is to let them flow, and let yourself flow with them…
Dermout always seems to hold the characters at arm’s length, especially the Europeans; in “Constance and the Sailor,” she names each servant but never names the young Dutch official or his young Dutch wife. By omitting their names, she effectively distances them from the story and their surroundings. They do not belong to the islands. They do not know the islands, and the islands do not know them. Only those who know and are known by the island have their names made known to the reader: Felicia, Himpies, Professor McNeill. The exception is Felicia’s grandmother, who seems to be part of the island but whose name is never mentioned—perhaps, despite her deep respect for nature and for Javanese tradition, she always remained “proud”— she became one with the Small Garden and the inner bay but never one with the outer bay or the town. She was not the sort of woman who would hold a vigil for the dead, not just for her dead but for the island’s dead as well.
The matriarchs of the Small Garden gradually become one with the Garden itself. Or perhaps it is wrong to call them matriarchs, since they are each barren after their own fashion. Their husbands and sons have gone away or have passed away. They rule over nothing but their Garden and their memories. The book itself is memory — Felicia’s memory.
Felicia becomes her grandmother just as her grandmother, before her, had presumably become her grandmother. Like grandmother, Felicia grows from a young, detached Dutch woman, nodding with incomprehension when things in the inner bay were pointed out to her, thinking, “yes, yes, for sure—who cares,” to become the caretaker, the nurturer, the very soul of the Garden and the house.
But though she snaps at her son in a no-nonsense way and will not have things as both “one and the other,” in a way reminiscent of her grandmother, she still does not have her grandmother’s pride and spirit. And I find Felicia a more sympathetic and likable character precisely because of that, because she surrenders to her memory of her son in a way her grandmother certainly would not have done. Unlike her grandmother, she is not superstitious, but she believes in the soul of things more strongly than her grandmother, so strongly that she pays her respects to the dead every year for a day, so strongly that she still loves the stranger-husband who left her and her son, so strongly that she tries to go on living even when there was precious little to live for. She realizes that life is not possible without the dead: they are always there, by our side, like the three little girls, unseen but present, reminding us of the mysteries, the silences, the unspoken-of things that make up a life.