Louis Couperus

The "Hidden Force" is a 1900 novel by the Dutch writer Louis Couperus. The story is set at the end of the nineteenth century and concerns the cultural gap between East and West, between the Netherlands and their colony on Java. The Dutch colonists, who rule Java, realize that the island maintains its own natural order by way of a hidden force, "goena goena", a term denoting magic as well as depths of eastern cultures. Louis Marie-Anne Couperus (10 June 1863 ? 16 July 1923) was a Dutch novelist and poet during the Belle Epoque. His oeuvre contains a wide variety of genres: poetry, fairy tales, psychological novels, and historical novels. Couperus is considered to be one of the foremost figures in Dutch literature.

Louis Couperus was catapulted to prominence in 1889 with Eline Vere, a psychological masterpiece inspired by Flaubert and Tolstoy. Eline Vere is a young heiress: dreamy, impulsive, and subject to bleak moods. Though beloved among her large coterie of friends and relations, there are whispers that she is an eccentric: she has been known to wander alone in the park as well indulge in long, lazy philosophical conversations with her vagabond cousin. When she accepts the marriage proposal of a family friend, she is thrust into a life that looks beyond the confines of The Hague, and her overpowering, ever-fluctuating desires grow increasingly blurred and desperate. Only Couperus--as much a member of the elite socialite circle of fin-de-si cle The Hague as he was a virulent critic of its oppressive confines--could have filled this "Novel of The Hague" with so many superbly rendered and vividly imagined characters from a milieu now long forgotten. Award-winning translator Ina Rilke's new translation of this Madame Bovary of The Netherlands will reintroduce to the English-speaking world the greatest Dutch novelist of his generation.