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The New York Times Book Review
...a haunting record of a great writer's attempt to keep his imagination and his humanity alive under terrible conditions.
The New York Times Book Review
When I tell people that the most exciting work of fiction I've read in a long time is a tetralogy of novels about the emergence of modern Indonesia, they tend to look at me with pitying stares. But Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet, beginning with ''This Earth of Mankind'' and running through ''House of Glass,'' is one of those sprawling literary mansions, built of exotic materials, that display the mysteries of a foreign culture while magically containing rooms that seem designed with you in mind. Set at the turn of the 20th century, the dawn of Indonesian national consciousness, the novels tell the story of Minke, the only native Javanese in an elite Dutch academy. An aspiring writer, Minke uses his Western education to separate himself from the feudal Javanese past, and his Javanese identity to rebel against the Dutch colonialists, forging a complex identity -- personal, political and literary -- that is something new under the sun. Before our eyes, he becomes a modern man, the citizen of a country not yet born. Making these novels even more remarkable are the conditions under which Pramoedya wrote them. Arrested in 1965 -- a year of political turmoil that saw hundreds of thousands of Indonesians murdered -- the 41-year-old Pramoedya, though never charged or tried, spent the next 14 years in prison, 11 of them on Buru Island, a penal camp in the Moluccas some 850 miles east of Java. Denied paper or pen for the first few years of his incarceration, Pramoedya, who was already one of Indonesia's best-known writers, told his fellow prisoners the story of Minke each morning before roll-call as a way to shape and remember the tale. The lines that appear at the end of the first two volumes tell their own haunting story: Buru Island Prison Camp, spoken, 1973 written 1975. The shadow tale of the author's suffering and survival is fleshed out in ''The Mute's Soliloquy,'' a volume of memoirs covering Pramoedya's years on Buru Island. Originally published in a Dutch translation in 1988 and in Indonesian in 1995, the memoirs have been translated now for the first time into English. (It is worth noting that Pramoedya's books remain officially banned in Indonesia, where Pramoedya himself -- in keeping with the irresolution of his country's political present -- seems to be regarded as a literary lion, a national treasure and an enemy of the state.) Arranged roughly to follow the progress of his arrest, imprisonment and release, the fragments bundled into ''The Mute's Soliloquy'' are much more than a memoir of prison life. There are autobiographical confessions, meditations on death and fate and writing, harsh descriptions of prison life and sudden, dreamy passages of intense lyrical beauty. These can just as quickly give way to pages where Pramoedya (who even in his fiction can write like someone who got his education from the encyclopedia) seems to be accumulating an undifferentiated mass of information, like a man keeping himself sane by constantly tallying the store of his mind. But, as in his fiction, where a flood of information is often the hard-won food of an awakening mind, these fact-packed passages have a mysteriously touching quality, the product of a mind that even in exile and isolation is determined to learn and record everything he can. And Pramoedya seems so consumed with his idea of what an Indonesian ought to be -- which in turn seems inseparable from his notion of what being human is -- that everything he describes has a kind of emblematic quality. He is, as a writer, remarkable for his ability to give brutal realism a mythic dimension. Pramoedya, as he is known in Indonesia (Javanese do not often use family names), was born in the village of Blora in 1925, the eldest of seven siblings (his name, he writes, is derived from a phrase that means ''first on the battlefield''). His father was a fierce Indonesian nationalist and educator, as well as a gambler ultimately unable to support his family. Pramoedya, who writes with outrage about the treatment of women in traditional Javanese society, was much closer to his long-suffering mother, who died of tuberculosis at 34. It was not until after her death, when he visited her grave, that he learned her name -- such,'' he writes, ''was the fate of a woman of that time.'' Most moving in ''The Mute's Soliloquy'' are the letters Pramoedya wrote to his children but never sent, convinced they would not arrive. He dispenses fatherly advice (in one he gives a daughter a social science lesson using his own imprisonment as a model), explains his understanding of Indonesian history, reveals snippets of his own past and gives glimpses of life on Buru. To another daughter he writes of the ship that took him into exile on Buru and of the lines of a Negro spiritual that haunted him and gave him comfort during the journey. Changing keys abruptly, he shares with her his diet of ''gutter rats, the moldy outgrowth on papaya trees and banana plants, and leeches, skewered on palm-leaf ribs prior to eating.'' He describes how one of the most educated prisoners went about eating a lizard, breaking off the toe pads and swallowing it whole, adding, admiringly, ''That man's will to defend himself against hunger was a victory in itself.'' There are far starker accounts of life on Buru, where the prisoners labored to clear forests, pave roads, create and farm rice paddies and build their own barracks, all the while suffering severe malnutrition, repeated beatings and torture, as well as periodic assaults from the native population, who in several instances murder prisoners with spears and machetes. The book's final section is a starkly eloquent list enumerating those who died while on Buru. Once Pramoedya received permission to write, in 1973, his fellow political prisoners built him a private room inside the barracks and took on his chores so that he was free to spend his days writing. It is one of the ironies of Pramoedya's irony-filled life that imprisonment may have been, like Homer's blindness, a mysterious precondition for the epic quality of his work, an oddly liberating influence, though one for which he paid a terrible price. His very career seems born of this paradox: he wrote his first published novel, ''The Fugitive,'' in 1948, while imprisoned by the Dutch for revolutionary activity and has, since his release from Buru in 1979, apparently suffered bouts of writer's block. Indeed, ''The Mute's Soliloquy'' was composed during Pramoedya's imprisonment, not after his liberation, with the author constantly afraid that his words would be confiscated and used against him. (At the time of his arrest, Pramoedya's library was carted off and destroyed, his manuscripts and papers burned.) In a sense this book has been triply edited -- first, by the conditions Pramoedya wrote under; second, by the authorities, who, at the time of Pramoedya's release, confiscated and destroyed numerous manuscripts, including several novels, part of an encyclopedia and hundreds of scattered notes and papers; and, finally, by the translator of the work, Willem Samuels. Samuels explains in an afterword that he eliminated hundreds of pages that appeared in the Indonesian original of ''The Mute's Soliloquy'' because they seemed too detailed for a general, non-Indonesian audience. This is not a book from which to gain a clear picture of modern Indonesian history or of Pramoedya's place in it -- there is too little context, too many gaps, including gaps about Pramoedya's own fiercely political role in the cultural politics of the country before his arrest. The book has a scattered, dreamlike quality. Its tone and focus, though it seems churlish to say so given the conditions of its creation, can vary wildly. What holds it together is Pramoedya's remarkable voice, a peculiar mixture of modesty and outrage, world-weariness and almost mystical innocence, historical exhaustion and unkillable optimism. Doubly distanced from Western readers by birth and exile, Pramoedya nevertheless speaks in a voice of startling immediacy and has managed to produce a haunting record of a great writer's attempt to keep his imagination and his humanity alive under terrible conditions. The New Yorker "Indonesia's epic storyteller." The New York Times Mr. Toer is a master, and a briliant one, at setting out an intricate web of motivations, character, and emotion. The San Fransisco Chronicle Pramoedya Ananta Toer, in addition to being a celebrated dissident, is Indonesia's Albert Camus. The comparison works on many levels, not the least of which is the author's ability to confront monumental questions on their most elemental plane. The Los Angeles Times As eloquent and sensual as James Baldwin.... As hip and smart and bleak and dark as Dashiell Hammett... Toer is a novelist who should get in line for the Nobel Prize.
Booklist: April 15, 1999
In 1965, Indonesian novelist Toer was sent to Buru, a prison island where he would spend the next 17 years for reasons never actually explained to him, though surely his populist critiques of an oppressive Indonesian regime were at the root. While a prisoner, Toer felt himself a "mute," unable to exercise his literary voice through his novels. But he did secretly jot down this collection of letters, essays, and notes, and in them life on Buru is shown in terrible precision, from the near-starvation conditions that cause men to lose fully half their weight, to the slave labor they perform for tyrannical guards, and the many interrogations Toer endured. Not surprisingly, he contemplates the serenity of death, but rejects this way out, affirming the life he once had and hopes to regain. Strangely calm, often wry, and deeply moving.
Kirkus Reviews
A distinguished novelist's (The Buru Quartet: House of Glass, 1996, etc.) painful remembrances of the 14 years he spent in an Indonesian prison work camp. Toer acknowledges the somewhat fragmented nature of his memoirmuch of it was pieced together from surviving notes that had been smuggled out of the labor camp at great personal risk. For four years, he was forbidden from writing at all, and even when permission was officially granted, the penalty for offending any prison official would certainly have been severe. Toer was arrested along with tens of thousands of other Indonesian citizens after the military takeover which ousted President Sukarno in 1965. As a category B political prisoner (too dangerous to be freed, but not threat enough for immediate execution), he was exiled to a prison work camp on Buru, an undeveloped island in the Moluccas. His story describes the difficulties faced by himself and his fellow prisoners: they were forced to clear roads to the interior of the island using only their hands, to till the hard-packed arid soil of the fields with hand hoes, to build rice paddies in sweltering swamps without proper clothing. Prisoners were punished frequently for unclear infractionsbeaten with rifle butts and bamboo canes. They suffered starvation and malnutrition, and were reduced to eating snakes, rats, and lizards for survival. Corrupt guards and officials stole the prisoners food or demanded tribute in the form of precious chickens and eggs. In addition to serving as witness to the fate of his fellow prisoners, Toer describes the process by which one writes oneself back from the incoherence of nearly total oppression. He describes his writing as a way of using narrative to restore his integrity as a human beinghe then attempts to extend this benefit to his fellow victims. The chilling true story behind much of the acclaimed fiction of Toer. The New York Times Book Review "A haunting record of a great writer's attempt to keep his imagination and his humanity alive."
San Francisco Chronicle
"A story too vast and serious to ignore."
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