The Hidden Force (Translated) (Annotated): Scandal, empire, and the occult in colonial Java – Kobo eBook

This edition includes:
New English translation
Critical introduction
139 editor’s notes

A colonial empire can be run on reports, irrigation ditches and promotion lists until the night something invisible spits on a woman’s bare skin, and no one can prove it, file it or punish it. That is the predicament of Resident Otto van Oudijck, and it is the engine of one of the strangest, most gripping novels ever written about power and what power cannot touch.

Van Oudijck governs his district of Laboewangi with a firm hand and an unshakeable faith in facts. At his side is his second wife Lonie, beautiful, bored and perfectly indifferent, and his children Theo and Doddy, all of them moving through a colonial society of receptions, gossip, debts and quiet affairs. Around them lies the other Java: the stille kracht, the hidden force, a spiritual presence that answers Dutch authority with silence, and that begins to announce itself in the smallest possible ways a pebble in a bedroom, anonymous letters, a drink that turns the wrong colour, a sound overhead that will not stop. What begins as domestic nuisance becomes a slow siege on everything Van Oudijck believes he understands.

This edition is a literary translation made to be read today: natural, vivid English that carries Couperus’s voice, his dry irony, his sensuous detail and his eerie restraint without ever losing the substance of what he wrote. The result is a novel that works equally as colonial drama and as psychological haunting.

This volume opens with a critical introduction, placed before the author’s text, that illuminates the world of Laboewangi the residency household, the regent system, the fin-de-sicle aesthetics Couperus shared with his characters and offers a way into a book whose mystery it wisely refuses to solve.

Add it to your library and let the hidden force do its work on you.