The Journal of the Siam Society Vol. LXXI, Part 1-2, 1983 - Khamkoo

ltEvtEWS 253
suffering from a splitting headache, taking various local and ineffective' remedies,
recalls having heard , the Germans had recently developed something called aspirin
(actuatly formulated in 1899), but it had not arrived ~n Java yet. The Indies, Minke
bemoans, were etematly waiting for products from Europe,- never inventing or producing
by themselves.
But there are also weaknesses. Perhaps ,the most striking is the shallowness of
some of the characterisation, most markedly in Annalies, a person without a will of her
own, given to the vapours, dying of love, a beautitill empty shadow. Indeed, all the
women are rather flat : Sa:rah and Miriam de Ia Croix, the Assistant Resident's daughters,
are cardboard characters, Minke's mother personifies gentle reasonableness but
does not emerge as a person, the boarding house landlady is a stereotype; Magda
Peters, like the de la Croix daughters, is a vehicle for ideas rather thaa a person, though
she is better drawn than they, thanks to the minute observation of her freckles and
gulpings. The Japanese prostitute's tale reads more like a sociological case study, and
even the way in which Nyai's story is told to her daughter is a little artificial as Iiteratu~e..
Only Nyai Ontosoroh emerges as a genuine female character, in her case so
powerful she devours the will-power of everyone around her. She is more masculine
than the men in her entourage, claws her way up to the top against all odds, dominates,
but is ultimately defeated, not without a spirited eondemnation of the feudal colonial
system-"Who turned me into a concubine? Who turned us all into nyais? European
gentlemen made masters."
There are occasional shifts in the narrative which are poorly arranged. It
seems inconceivable that Minke should not have known, if only by gossip, as he chose
not to read his family's letters, that the Bupati of B ... was his own father. From
being in the de Ia Croix residence there is a jump to reading the letters Minke had
hitherto chosen to ignore, to being followed by the spy Fatso. A smoother transition
is desirable.
There are strange quirks in the translation, which talks of the 'part' of the
hair instead of the parting, and has Fatso 'hanging around the ticket' at a station, when
presumably the ticket office was intended. A subject was supplemented by 'quite a
deal' of extra information, and sometimes objects are unclear-"the white official rose
from his chair, took the sash and draped it over his shoulder"; whose, his own or the
Bupati's? The proof reading also leaves something to be desired. A whole line is
repeated on p. 163, 'someone' is misspelt as two words, and the unforgivable error 'It's
title was' appears on p. 240. The footnotes are helpful, though it is perhaps hardly
necessary to explain what is mahjong.