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The Washington Post Book World Pramoedya's "Buru Quartet" is 'one of the twentieth century's great artistic creations, a work of the richest variety, color, size, and import.'
Publisher's Weekly A vibrant portrait of a people coalescing into nationhood, this third volume of a projected tetralogy (the Buru quartet) by Indonesian novelist Pramoedya continues the story begun in Child of All Nations and This Earth of Mankind. The protagonist is again expelled Javanese medical student Minke, who now becomes a journalist, then a grass-roots political organizer and eventually a crusading publisher of the archipelago's first Native-owned daily newspaper. Set in the period 1901 to 1912, this novel measures Minke's dream of a unified, multiethnic Indonesia free of Dutch rule, against the harsh realities of colonial occupation. The picture is bleak: oppression, exploitation, slavery and brutal subjugation of the Netherlands Indies' indigenous people by the Dutch military, working in concert with a local ruling elite. Inspired by the life of Indonesian journalist Tirto Adi Suryo, the story is rich in human drama and history. Minke corresponds with Ter Haar, a roving liberal Dutch journalist; battles his old nemesis, racist terrorist Robert Suurhof; and matures emotionally through two dramatic marriages. Lane's introduction will help readers new to these books to plunge into the engrossing narrative.
The New Republic
Western critics have been generally at a loss to convey the peculiarly didactic and reiterative quality of Pramoedya's {tetralogy}, . . . its relentless succession of desperately earnest conversations between typified characters in schematized scenes. . . . It is, in fact, . . . a series of narratives that consists almost entirely of talking heads explaining and reexplaining themselves to one another over a thirty-year period of political upheaval, almost allof which takes place offstage as summarily reported event--all of which fits oral patterns of literature . . . a good deal better than it does the plots and subplots of the realistic novel. . . . What Pramoedya has produced in The Buru Quartet is not, or anyway not primarily, a saga. . . . It is a sociologicaltableau: a . . . depiction of a multi-religious, multi-linguistic, multi-racial, multi-cultural society that, challenged to change its nature, merely rearranges its parts.
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