Minke is a young Javanese student of great intelligence and ambition. Living equally among the colonists and colonized of 19th-century Java, he battles against the confines of colonial strictures. It is his love for Annelies that enables him to find the strength to embrace his world.

This Earth Of Mankind

Toer, Pramoedya Ananta

Literature & Fiction

Penguin Australia

A series of four books which chronicle the birth of modern Indonesia through the story of Minke, an aspiring Javanese writer. In the first two books, Minke begins his education into the ways of the Europeon colonialists but tragedy strikes and he loses his first love. By the third book, "Footsteps", Minke is beginning to find his feet as a political organizer and the stirrings of Indonesian Nationalism are being felt. The books are set in the last decade of the 19th and the first decade of the 20th century, and give a historical picture of the varied culture of the Dutch East Indies, as well as a deep understanding of a people's painful emergence from colonial domination. The two previous books are "This Earth of Mankind" and "Child of All Nations".

Footsteps (Penguin International Writers)

Contemporary

Penguin Putnam~trade

Awakenings (This Earth Of Mankind; Child Of All Nations)

Penguin Books Australia

In Child of All Nations, the reader is immediately swept up by a story that is profoundly feminist, devastatingly anticolonialist—and full of heartbreak, suspense, love, and fury. Pramoedya immerses the reader in a world that is astonishing in its vividness: the cultural whirlpool that was the Dutch East Indies of the 1890s. A story of awakening, it follows Minke, the main character of This Earth of Mankind, as he struggles to overcome the injustice all around him. Pramoedya's full literary genius is evident in the brilliant characters that populate this world: Minke's fragile Mixed-Race wife; a young Chinese revolutionary; an embattled Javanese peasant and his impoverished family; the French painter Jean Marais, to name just a few.

Child of All Nations (Buru Quartet)

Literary

Penguin??Books

As the world moves into the twentieth century, Minke, one of the few European-educated Javanese, optimistically starts a new life in a new town: Betawi. With his enrollment in medical school and the opportunity to meet new people, there is every reason to believe that he can leave behind the tragedies of the past. But Minke can no more escape his past than he can escape his situation as part of an oppressed people under a foreign power. As his world begins to fall apart, Minke draws a small but fervent group around him to fight back against colonial exploitation. During the struggle, Minke finds love, friendship, and betrayal—with tragic consequences. And he goes from wanting to understand his world to wanting to change it. Pramoedya's full literary genius is again evident in the remarkable characters that populate the novel—and in his depiction of a people's painful emergence from colonial domination and the shackles of tradition.

Footsteps (Buru Quartet)

Penguin Publishing Group

Minke is a young Javanese student of great intelligence and ambition. Living equally among the colonists and colonized of 19th-century Java, he battles against the confines of colonial strictures. It is his love for Annelies that enables him to find the strength to embrace his world.

This Earth of Mankind (Buru Quartet)

Computers & Technology

Web Development & Design

With House Of Glass comes the final chapter of Pramoedya's epic quartet, set in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the century. A novel of heroism, passion, and betrayal, it provides a spectacular conclusion to a series hailed as one of the great works of modern literature. At the start of House of Glass, Minke, writer and leader of the dissident movement, is now imprisoned—and the narrative has switched to Pangemanann, a former policeman, who has the task of spying and reporting on those who continue the struggle for independence. But the hunter is becoming the hunted. Pangemanann is a victim of his own conscience and has come to admire his adversaries. He must decide whether the law is to safeguard the rights of the people or to control the people. He fears the loss of his position, his family, and his self-respect. At last Pangemanann sees that his true opponents are not Minke and his followers, but rather the dynamism and energy of a society awakened.

House of Glass (Buru Quartet)

From the author of the Buru Quartet and one of the greatest writers of our time comes a remarkable memoir of imprisonment and survival. In 1965, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was detained by Indonesian authorities and eventually exiled to the penal island of Buru. Without a formal accusation or trial, the onetime national hero was imprisoned on Buru for eleven years. He survived under brutal conditions, somehow managing to produce his masterwork, the four novels of the Buru Quartet, as well as the remarkable journal entries, essays, and letters that comprise this moving memoir. Reminiscent of the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Mute's Soliloquy is a harrowing portrait of a penal colony and a heartbreaking remembrance of life before it. With a resonance far beyond its particular time and place, it is Pramoedya's crowning achievement--a passionate tribute to the freedom of the mind and a celebration of the human spirit. "A haunting record of a great writer's attempt to keep his imagination and his humanity alive."-- The New York Times Book Review "A story too vast and serious to ignore."-- San Francisco Chronicle (front page review)

The Mute's Soliloquy: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

In the twilight days of Japanese power in his country, an Indonesian army officer sparks an insurrection against the occupation army but is forced to flee into the jungle when he is betrayed by one of his own comrades. Reprint.

The Fugitive

Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s transcendent novels have become part of the world literary canon, but it is his short fiction that originally made him famous. The first full-size collection of his short stories to appear in English, All That Is Gone draws from the author’s own experiences in Indonesia to depict characters trying to make sense of a war-torn culture haunted by colonialism, among them an eight-year-old girl soon to be married off by her parents for money and an idealistic young soldier who witnesses the savage beating of a man accused of being a spy. Though violence and brutality pervade these tales, there is present throughout a profound sense of compassion—an extraordinary combination of despair and hope that gives All That Is Gone rare power and beauty.

All That Is Gone

United States

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Books by Toer, Pramoedya Ananta