Old People and the Things that Pass
In this much-read family saga, one of the classics of Dutch literature, Couperus creates a highly variegated psychological portrait of a bourgeois family both bound together and torn apart by a terrible secret. The novel describes an entire social class, its wealth to a large extent derived from overseas colonies, as it heads towards ruin.
FictionPrint
Original title
Van oude menschen, de dingen, die voorbijgaan
Author
Louis Couperus
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That extraordinary gift for portraying the faintest shades of character and temperament, the divergencies, little and big, the varying differences in viewpoint existing in members of the same family is very evident.
The New York Times Book Review
Louis Couperus
Louis Couperus (1863-1923) spent much of his younger life in the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia), and many of his novels and stories are set either here, or in The Hague where he was born, though his work also contains impressions of Italy, Africa and China, the fruits of his tireless travelling.