Java Girl

“René van Landsberg stood alone on the deck of the steamer …there could be no turning back to Europe now. This was Java—the end of his journey—and he was a little frightened at all that the suave, exotic name implied.”

In search of his future, a young Dutchman travels south of the equator to join his older brother supervising a sugar plantation on Java, circa 1900. From the day he arrives, he struggles to adapt to social, cultural and sexual mores that are alien, even contradictory, to all his previous life experiences.

Despite having a “girl back home”, René soon encounters several young ladies of both his own race and Javanese. There, the complexities begin, not the least of which is Grandmother Dassam…“I have three packages,” her whining voice went on to the girl. “This one,” holding up a small package, “will kill a healthy person in one hour… This second one will kill more slowly—about a month—and this one will take several years, but he’ll suffer much and die in the end.”

When in Java, expect the unexpected.

***

Born in Holland in 1879, author Baron Schwartzenberg also worked on Java as a young man. Three decades later he was driven to enlist journalist Mary Bennett Harrison to help him tell this story. How many vignettes, characters or women he drew from actual experiences is unknown. But as you’ll discover, this highly credible colonial romance rings true.

After a 90 year hiatus, literary archaeologist Kent Davis revives the Baron’s 1931 novel as an expanded modern edition with nearly 300 period photos showing Javanese people and places featured in the text. Plus appendices with publisher’s notes; author bios; Davis’ article “Javanese Women in Photos: Emerging Technologies and World Views”; excerpts from the 1912 travel guide, Isles of the East, and the 1929 book Malay Poisons and Charm Cures; a glossary of Indonesian terms; and regional maps.