The Hidden Force: A Story of Modern Java

319 pages. The boards are lightly stained at the tail; there is a bookseller's stamp on the tail of the front paste down, and an ownership signature on the title page; some of the pages have been short cut by the printer, but the book's worse sin by far is that it is foxed, badly so in some pages. In its favour it's unmarked and the binding very good. First edition, translated by Alexander Teixeira De Mattos."The "Hidden Force" is a 1900 novel by the Dutch writer Louis Couperus. The story is set at the end of the nineteenth century and concerns the cultural gap between East and West, between the Netherlands and their colony on Java. The Dutch colonists, who rule Java, realize that the island maintains its own natural order by way of a hidden force, "goena goena", a term denoting magic as well as depths of eastern cultures. Louis Marie-Anne Couperus (10 June 1863 ? 16 July 1923) was a Dutch novelist and poet during the Belle Epoque. His oeuvre contains a wide variety of genres: poetry, fairy tales, psychological novels, and historical novels. Couperus is considered to be one of the foremost figures in Dutch literature.". …