Old People and the Things That Pass |
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Author:
| Couperus, Louis |
Translator:
| Mattos, Alexander |
ISBN: | 978-1-4922-1792-3 |
Publication Date: | Aug 2013 |
Publisher: | CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
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Book Format: | Paperback |
List Price: | USD $9.99 |
Book Description:
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If people are not interested in small souls and old people and things that pass, if they shrink from looking upon life from the meditative ironic view, let them (the author would say) take warning in advance. If they prefer rose-colored glasses, so much the pleasanter for them, no doubt: our own happen to be of neutral color or, perhaps, slightly tinged with grey. Still, if we do not see life as a pretty thing, an affair of juvenile love-making ending with the wedding...
More DescriptionIf people are not interested in small souls and old people and things that pass, if they shrink from looking upon life from the meditative ironic view, let them (the author would say) take warning in advance.
If they prefer rose-colored glasses, so much the pleasanter for them, no doubt: our own happen to be of neutral color or, perhaps, slightly tinged with grey. Still, if we do not see life as a pretty thing, an affair of juvenile love-making ending with the wedding bells, or of brisk comedy inviting to laughter, neither do we see it as the gross affair of the naturalists with their attempt to reduce human nature to the proportions of an obscene scrawl in an outhouse. The routine and much of the substance of life are wearisome and often ugly. But it contains self-rewarding affection as well as unhappy passion, noble endurance as well as meaningless suffering, a true bond of souls as well as the conventional and often clogging bonds of kinship or marriage. And under its drab surface, through its humdrum action, often runs a thread of tragic romance.
Such is the atmosphere in which the Louis Couperus envelops us.
To begin with, this whole book is saturated with the sense of age. "So old-so old," is the incessant refrain. There are Grandmamma, ninety-seven; her friends and former lovers, Mr. Takma, ninety-three, and Doctor Roelofsz, eighty-eight; her children in their sixties and seventies; her grandchildren some of whom already feel and dread the approach of age. "So old-so old..."
For these old and very old people are not mere shadows and echoes of the past, long since dead or dying as actors in the world's drama. A single red and deathless moment out of the past has kept the past alive, made it a part of the present. The dramatic action, which had readied its first climax sixty years ago, is still to be concluded-must be concluded-before the chief actors are released from the burden and the passion of living. Sixty years back "Grandmamma," already a woman of nearly forty, was found by her husband with her lover. Next morning the body of the husband is discovered among the boulders of the river that ran near their bungalow-in a remote Indian district. The wife and her lover are guilty of his death. Roelofsz is sure of it, but officially returns a report of death by accident. He exacts his price of the woman, and remains true to his promise of silence. There are rumors of foul play, talk of investigation, but the crime is never brought home. Outside of "Grandmother," her lover Takma, and Roelofsz, only an old Indian baboc and the twelve-year-old son of the murdered man know what has happened. The son keeps silence, but his life is blasted by his dreadful secret. The baboc, before her death many years later, tells her son-the beginning of blackmail. The central figures in this last act of the drama, sixty years after, are the strange trio whom love and crime have linked in secret, and who seem condemned to wait and listen for the retribution which has so long stayed its hand. There is a touch of conventional romance in making an instrument of discovery out of the half-destroyed letter that falls from the dying Takma's hand. It is a haunting tale, piteous and somber and yet not without elements of beauty, as notably in the character of Lot, sensitive and generous and achieving what it may against the deadly inhibitions of its inheritance.