Dutch East Indies Literature
An important segment of her literary work consists of Dutch Indies literature. Her debut Oeroeg (1948), is set in the Dutch East Indies, where Haasse was born and lived for most of the first 20 years of her life. Even more autobiographical texts and books about her life in the East Indies, includes books such as Krassen op een rots (1970). The East Indies continued to play an important part in her work as can be seen in her last novel Sleuteloog (2002), which has the same theme as Oeroeg: is a friendship between a Dutch and an Indonesian child possible and can they really understand each other?
Her successful debut book Oeroeg was well received and often reprinted, but did experience some controversy due to the critical reception by the older author Tjalie Robinson. The Indo (Eurasian) Tjalie Robinson pointed out why he did not find the characters in the story credible. Moreover as Tjalie Robinson himself was still living in the Dutch East Indies at that time, hoping for and working towards fraternization between the Dutch and Indonesians his sharp criticism was directed against what he considered the defeatist nature of the book.
The movie Oeroeg based on the book premiered in 1993.
Her internationally acclaimed Magnus opus "Heren van de Thee" was translated to ‘The Tea Lords’ in 2010. It is a historical novel set in the Dutch East Indies of the 19th and 20th century, based on a trove of documents and letters deposited in the Netherlands by the heirs and relations of the book’s characters.
”I can only say that realising her characters were once flesh and blood made me feel I had read the most humane sort of biography, in which the writer inhabits every emotional recess and significance. That may make The Tea Lords sound like half a novel; but read it and you might agree that it is more in the nature of an improvisation, a graceful, marvellously achieved improvisation that only a novelist of the greatest imagination and sympathy could have written.” Julian Evans.
Read more about this topic: Hella Haasse
Famous quotes containing the words dutch, east, indies and/or literature:
“Paradise endangered: garden snakes and mice are appearing in the shadowy corners of Dutch Old Master paintings.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“I know no East or West, North or South, when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman’s child in America, and if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there shall I go.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“It is my duty to prevent, through the independence of Cuba, the U.S.A. from spreading over the West Indies and falling with added weight upon other lands of Our America. All I have done up to now and shall do hereafter is to that end.... I know the Monster, because I have lived in its lair—and my weapon is only the slingshot of David.”
—José Martí (1853–1895)
“The literature of women’s lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.”
—Phyllis Rose (b. 1942)