It's only as the two friends reach school-age that the Dutch planter and his wife become aware that their freckly offspring can only converse in Soendansese. As in so many stories of colonial childhood, he describes these early years as a time of Rousseau-esque innocence, spent roaming the jungle foothills and eating pancakes in the servants' quarters. Haasse was born in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) and moved to the Netherlands after finishing secondary school. Charting the friendship between the son of a Dutch settler and a local boy this understated novella – newly translated by Ina Rilke under the title The Black Lake – wears its message and metaphors lightly.īrought up on a tea plantation in the Preanger highlands, the novel's narrator recalls how as a child he became fast friends with the son of his father's foreman, a boy called Oeroeg. When it was first published in the Netherlands in 1948, Hella S Haasse's debut, Oeroeg, alerted Dutch readers to the consequences of their continued colonial presence in Indonesia.
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