Faded Portraits

by Robert Nieuwenhuys and Noelle Crooks

Book Overview

A fictionalized memoir of family life in former colonial Dutch East Indies, Faded Portraits is the story of the once powerful DePaulys, and especially of Aunt Sophie, the matriarch, whose efforts to preserve the family heritage- the "purity" of the Dutch bloodline and culture- prove inevitably tragic. The forms to which aunt Sophie clings, and which she seeks to impose on her family, represent an arrogant blindness to the personal needs of...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0870233637
• ISBN13: 9780870233630
• Release Date: April 1982
• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.5" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

A glimpse into an era long since past

I am only now beginning to retrace the steps of my mothers life. One which began for a brief period in the Netherlands and then spread to the Dutch East Indies and a life in the colonial tropics. This book was the first one I picked up as I began my research to try and etch an image of how life must have been like for her and others like her during that time. Though my family is not descedants of the same wealth as portrayed in this book it does provide a vivid account of how certain factions of the ruling class carried out their daily lives. Oblivious to the importance of the culture that surrounded them and only focused on imposing their own. This book gave me vibrant insights, realistic portayals of characters to which I could easily relate and glimpse into a life long since gone. A book I could not put down for many, many reasons.