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The Tea Lords

The Tea Lords

by HellaS.Haasse (Author), InaRilke (Translator)

  • New

    Paperback 2011

    $11.32
Synopsis

Rudolf leaves his comfortable origins in Delft by ship for Java to help run the family's estates there. He moves from plantation to plantation, attempting to understand the ways of the local peoples, their version of Islam and their relationship to their land. On a visit to the capital, Jakarta, he falls in love with a teenage girl, Jenny, who he courts surreptitiously via his sister, with grave consequences for the reality of their relationships. Eventually they marry, and make a hard colonist-couple's life theirs, bear, lose and raise children, before Jenny on her visit to the home country discovers all the comforts of which she has been deprived in Java. Back at the plantation homestead, as the back-breaking work of establishing and maintaining business takes its toll on Rudolf, Jenny becomes estranged from him, and the bitter resentments of relatives eat at her until a terrible solution is achieved.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
 Pages: 352
 Publisher: Portobello Books Ltd
Published: 01 Sep 2011
ISBN 10: 1846271711
ISBN 13: 9781846271717

Media Reviews
A graceful, marvellously achieved improvisation that only a novelist of the greatest imagination and sympathy could have written - Julian Evans, Guardian
Put it at the top of your reading list - S tylist
Haasse has created a compelling piece of innovative historical fiction ... [She] effortlessly combines an evocation of the plantation's heady, lush vegetation with her articulation of the growing distance between man and wife. And her aptly chosen metaphors are all skillfully conveyed in Ina Rilke's translation - Sunday Times
Displays a knowledgeable and intimate empathy for plantation life, sucking you into the steaming Indonesian jungles and cut-glass propriety of Dutch colonial society without suspending judgement on colonialism itself - Metro
The large cast of characters is convincingly displayed and deftly manipulated. The evocation of Java is vivid and full of feeling - Scotsman
Haasse's atmospheric historical novel receives an elegantly idiomatic translation from Ina Rilke ... an affecting portrait of a life devoted to duty, which asks whether the sacrifice was worth the emotional costs. - Financial Times
Translated into graceful prose, this morally challenging work, constructed from documents and letters, has already become a novel by which others, inside and outside its tradition, can be judged. - Independent
Author Bio
Hella S. Haasse was born in 1918 in Batavia, modern-day Jakarta. She moved to the Netherlands after secondary school. She started publishing in 1945 and many of her books have gained classic status in the Netherlands. Haasse has received several prestigious literary awards, among them the Dutch Literature Prize in 2004, and her work has been translated into many languages. The Tea Lords is the first work of hers translated into English for 15 years. www.hellahaassemuseum.nl Ina Rilke translates Dutch, Flemish and French literature. Among the authors she has translated are Hafid Bouazza, Louis Couperus, W.F. Hermans, Erwin Mortier, Cees Nooteboom, Pierre Peju and Dai Sijie. She has won the Vondel Translation Prize, the Scott Moncrieff Prize, and the Flemish Culture Prize for literary translation.