Louis Couperus

The Hidden Force Louis Couperus

The Hidden Force (A Story of Modern Java), (Dutch: De Stille Kracht), is a novel by Dutch novelist and poet Louis Marie-Anne Couperus and was originally published in English in 1922, as translated by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos. The work is a story set on the island of Java in the Dutch East Indies, where the author Couperus was raised, telling the story of Van Oudijck the commissioner of an area of East Java, who quells a rebellion through his deft verbal skills. The commissioner is however wholly oblivious to the supernatural "hidden forces" on the island, and the tensions within his own household, both of which plague him throughout the work. The Hidden Force tells the story of Javanese-Dutch politics, urban life, colonial bureaucracy, and supernatural forces on a foreign island, which was later adapted into a Dutch TV series in the 1970s, and has been marked for adaptation by renowned director Paul Verhoeven.