The Hidden Force (Library of the Indies) Couperus, L.; Beekman, E. M. and Teixeira de Mattos, Alexander

Originally published in Dutch in 1900 as De stille kracht, Louis Couperus's novel unfolds in colonial Java, where Van Oudijck, a Dutch resident administrator, governs with confidence in his own rationalism. The forces working against him - the landscape, the people, the atmosphere of the island itself - operate outside the frame he understands, and his authority erodes as the colony's mystical undercurrents overtake him. The work stands as an early literary reckoning with the fragility of Dutch power in the Indies. This 1990 University of Massachusetts Press paperback is a reprint of the English translation.