The Islands

The East Indies, editor Beekman notes, could justly be called "Holland's Atlantis" - Edenic, pure, terrifying, nowhere. And while these Dutch stories about the Indies rarely specify their locality or geography, they stay all the more beautiful for their abstract loneliness. The narrator of all the tales seems to be a sort of commercial manager (Dutch) - first put down on an Indonesian island (in "Green"), then left there to grow into his obsession with the deep woods just to the north of the beach he lives on. Soon enough he's trekking toward them: "Straight trunks, green light, always the same, and it must be very ancient. It is Time, I say laughing. Ancient, green, and always the same." (This making of space into time is Alberts' most haunting allegorical tool.) Similarly, in other stories, the few characters here are dwarfed by the sea and light and forests and mountains, with humanity's small doings taking devil-may-care turns: soldiers and shipwrecks become local potentates; enterprises begin and then simply peter out; expeditions go around in circles. Moreover, casual, pared sentences (well offered by translator Koning) give these poetic stories a languorous song that prompts a spell - and Alberts is so appealing and lucent a writer that translations of his novels would certainly be welcome. (Kirkus Reviews)