The Ten Thousand Things
Felicia lives alone on a remote spice estate in the Moluccas, drifting through the rooms where her grandmother raised her and where her son was killed. Around her the island gives up its small museum of objects, shells, jars, plant fragments, each tied to a person who is no longer alive. Maria Dermout writes in short scenes that move between the present and a colonial past, refusing a single timeline in favor of memory and dream. The book is famous in the Netherlands as a quiet masterpiece and was rediscovered in English through the NYRB Classics edition. Strayed reads it on the trail in Wild as part of her PCT library.
What you might want to know about The Ten Thousand Things
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
On a spice island in the Moluccas, an aging woman recalls the dead who have shaped her, in a hypnotic Dutch novel first published in 1955.
Yes. Strayed lists The Ten Thousand Things among the books she carries and reads on the PCT, alongside Adrienne Rich's poems and works by Faulkner and Nabokov.
1955 in Dutch as De tienduizend dingen. The NYRB Classics edition reissued Hans Koning's English translation in 2002.
The Ten Thousand Things was written by Maria Dermout, published in 2002 by NYRB Classics.
The Ten Thousand Things is 224 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Ten Thousand Things takes most readers 3 to 5 hours to finish.
The Ten Thousand Things is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.