SHIMMER, MEMORY

In a passage suffused with deliberately loaded imagery, the hero and heroine of Ada, by Vladimir Nabokov, did things which were the inevitable culmination of the preceding chapters in the book. After it's over, she whispers that her nightie is trempé. Uncle Sihan-Lim (S. Van Leem) said that it brought back strong memories of the time when, near daybreak, they could see the sugar factory down the valley from where they lived in Java up in flames. There had been rumours about a lack of sufficient funds to pay the workers for weeks before.

Remarkably, he did not sense the depravity drenching Nabokov's prose.
Calculated, sodden, soaking the fabric of the text.
He was somewhat innocent.

Very much a pre-war gentleman. Somewhat baffled at how things had turned out. And he did not like the temperate climate and unexciting flatness of his mother country, and remembered the pre-war Indies with wistfulness. Things had been so different then.

At times he seemed drained and sad and small.

Modern readers of the book, used to more strong-flavoured prose, might also not see how risky that passage is, and find the entire thing far too innocent. Sihan had read it when the book first came out, before anyone had translated it into Dutch. I discovered it a few years later, and did not even think of needing a translation. But as a native English-speaker, I probably saw things there which he did not.

Plus as a teenager I was always alert to naughty bits.


Often when I read post-war Dutch-Indies literature I have to remember that that was a more innocent age, and the authors are describing things through the prism of their youthful mind. Everything is frozen, the fragments shimmer in the amber of the past.

For them, eating was almost a religious act. There was so little food in the camps, they had not thought much about food before then, but afterwards it was a deliberate revival of taste memories. The Netherlands in the fifties in that regard had been disappointing.
No chilies. No ketumbar or kunyit. No rice. No asem or ketjap manis.

Fortunately things were different when I was there.
I ate well. And I remember that.



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