It’s the birthday of Dutch author Maria Dermoût (1888-1962), who did not publish until her 60s and then became one of the great authors of Dutch and Dutch-Indies literature.

Dermoût was born in Pekalongan, Java, then part of the Dutch East Indies, and raised on a sugar plantation there. She studied in the Netherlands and returned to Java as a young woman, remaining for most of her life; her two novels draw on her life experience there. Days before Yesterday (or Just Yesterday, 1951) was published when Dermoût was 63; The Ten Thousand Things followed in 1955 and is considered a masterpiece of Dutch magical realism—something that was entirely new to European literature at the time. Replete with all the exoticism of the Spice Islands, the novel tells the story of Felicia, a young woman who was raised there as Dermoût was and who eventually loses her adult son to violence, as Dermoût did. (Her real-life son died in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.) Felicia’s particular ritual of working through this grief becomes a redemptive, life-affirming act.

Reviews of the novel indicate a highly compassionate work but at least some recent scholars feel that her novels, written from a nostalgic colonial viewpoint, undermined Indonesian nationalist aspirations and “contributed to unremembering the painful process of decolonialization” (Paul Doolan, “Maria Dermoût and ‘unremembering’ lost time,” Canadian Journal of Netherlandic Studies, Vol. 34, Issue 2, 2013). (NB: The Ten Thousand Things, translated by Hans Koning, is about $12 on Amazon and I really want to read it now, with postcolonial objections in mind; it sounds like a gorgeous read.)

Super Bonus Extra Fun Weird Fact: it’s also the birthday of another Dutch author, Xaviera Hollander (b. 1943), best known for her memoir, The Happy Hooker: My Own Story. Interestingly, Hollander was born in Japanese-occupied Dutch East Indies and started life in a Japanese internment camp. (So, you know, small world.) Years later she ended up in Manhattan at the Dutch consulate but left that job to become New York City’s leading madam. (This is all according to Wikipedia, which I never rely on as a sole source. But Hollander played it kind of fast and loose so maybe I will too, just this once.) The authorities caught up with her and said, “We’ll have none of that, thank you,” and she had to leave the country. Her book, which appears to have had a ghost writer, led to several “Happy Hooker” movies in the late 70s, first starring Lynn Redgrave and then two other actresses I’ve never heard of.

On that elevating note, have a deeply pleasurable Friday, a restorative weekend, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.