I Remember, I Remember

YESTERDAY (118 pp.)--Maria Dermot --Simon & Schuster ($3).

Maria Dermout is a little old (71) Dutch lady who remembers the life she led in Java before the European was seriously challenged, a time long ago when all daddies were rich and most mammas were good-looking. When Author Dermout's first book. The Ten Thousand Things, showed up in the U.S. last year (TIME. March 3). it seemed too good to be true: an I-remember-I-remember exercise in graceful recollection that almost never stumbled into teary nostalgia. Her second book simply proves once again that no art is so sweet as artlessness, no truth so substantial as simple truth.

Its central character, a little girl named Rick, leads much the same kind of life that Author Dermout herself knew in the

East Indies. If there is a fault, it lies in the question: How much of a good thing is bearable? The little girl is surrounded by servants who know more than their place; they know their background of overriding superstition in which native magic is more powerful than any white man's god. They obey their masters and know their masters' weaknesses. Their own lives encompass an area to which the white folks have no pass, and it is one of Author Dermout's virtues that she can suggest this life without dragging the reader through kitchens and bedrooms. There is a story of sorts. The small girl, with the awareness of the very young, sees a disastrous love affair founder, and she watches as white and native lives run courses that to her are not so much meaningless as mysterious. Already the Indonesians are rising in the first stages of rebellion: already the whites are grimly aware that force is not forceful enough.

Yet, as in The Ten Thousand Things, it is not the facts of life that matter so much in Yesterday as the fact of life. Author Dermout can tell much of what needs to be told about Javanese servants by catching them in moments of tenderness or bitterness when their blank-faced defenses are down. Best of all, she can describe a life no longer possible without resorting to plantation tears. Yesterday is offered as a bit of fiction. It does not matter how it is read, as imagination or autobiography; the best thing about this book is the fact that the reader is almost never aware of a fine writer at all.

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