Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1925–2006)

I read the entire (four-volume) Buru Quartet about seven or eight years ago and found it a tour de force. It has taken me all these years to return to his works in the form of this collection. These tales, written in the late ‘40s and early 50s, are dramatic, often intense, glimpses of the lives of the underclass as the Dutch are finally thrown out and Indonesia struggles to govern itself. (A useful introduction, by the way, explains how the book was a project of a translation collective and why the individual pieces are called “tales” and not “short stories.”) These tales, although not without humor, relate the misery and hopelessness of the poorest classes. My favorite stories included “Houseboy+Maid" (about a brother and sister, descended from a long line of servants, whose only aim in life is to become Dutch. A scathing critique of colonialism); “Stranded Fish"(friends who fought the Japanese but who have become ignored and bypassed by society—and thus the title); “News from Kebayoran" (the life of a prostitute whose initially promising life goes awry); “No Resolution" (the tale of a woman who served the Japanese during the war and her “revenge”); and “Gambir” (about revenge). Insightful, informative, depressing.… (més)

This is my favourite novel in this excellent quartet. Pangemanann is a native policeman, working for the Dutch colonial government. He has the job of monitoring Indonesian nationalist Minke’s activities.

At the end of the third book, Minke gets banished to Ambon in the Maluku Archipelago and exits the scene and so Pangemanann takes over from him as narrator for the fourth book, 'House of Glass'. Pangemanann gets promoted to be a colonial official in charge of studying and controlling the subversive movements that Minke led and still inspires. Pangemanann, an educated, intelligent man, struggles with his task. He secretly admires Minke and feels sympathy for the cause of his fellow Indonesians (although this term did not yet exist). However, he justifies his mission to destroy Minke’s work: he wants to get his pension and to continue to provide for his French wife and Indo children.

Pangemanann's internal conflicts pull him apart, he turns to drink and his wife leaves him. He falls into the arms of a prostitute, becomes ill, but still continues with his duties. Why? Maybe he’s a workaholic, or he knows it can be no other way. I prayed for the author to let him come to a moral decision, to give up his work before it was too late - but I knew it wasn’t going to be.

I found Pangemanann to be a more interesting narrator than the heroic Minke who (in the earlier novels) marries a beautiful half Dutch, half Javanese woman who dies, then marries a beautiful Chinese revolutionary, who also dies. Both of these deaths he manages to get over. Then Minke gets engaged to a French Indo girl of seventeen. Things don't work out, but no matter, he moves on to marry a beautiful princess from Maluku. The guy attracts every beautiful woman who graces the pages of the tetralogy! Rejection doesn’t come into it. Who can sympathize with such a character?

I really thought Pramoedya's writing detailing the mental anguish of (the evil) Pangemanann brilliant. I imagine it is rare that in a quartet of novels the last one is the best? I haven't got through many. Yukio Mishima's 'Sea of Tranquillity' comes to mind as a much-vaunted quartet - but I didn't get past book two. I'm so glad a pushed through to the end of the 'Buru Quartet'.… (més)

House of Glass (Rumah Kaca) is the last of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet, the series of four novels tracing Indonesia's 'awakening' that Toer wrote while in prison on the island of Buru. (See my review of Book 2 for the background to this). The quartet is an early example of historical fiction as activism, that is, it was written by an author redressing the hidden stories and silences of colonised peoples in well-researched fiction.

House of Glass is the next phase of Toer's novelised life of Tirto Adi Suryo, pioneer of Indonesia's national awakening and of Indonesian journalism. In Books 1-3 Minke is both the symbol of nationalism and the challenge to Dutch colonialism which emerged in the early 20th century but did not come to fruition until after World War Two. Toer shows how educating the cleverest of the Native Indonesians led to the development of European ideas about freedom and equality, the irony being that those same Europeans did not bestow freedom and equality on the people they colonised. Indeed, to forbid things is a colonial hobby that gives a pleasure of its own. It makes you feel more important and more powerful. It becomes the norm within six months in the colony, away from European democratic ideas.

By the end of Book 3, Minke has launched journalism that brought him to the attention of the Dutch authorities and now in Book 4, he is in exile.

So, with the hero of the first three novels offstage, House of Glass puts aside his story which is instead narrated through the reflections of the Native* Indonesian policeman Pangemanann, whose job it was to monitor and suppress the emerging independence movement. The 'house of glass' of the title refers to Pangemanann's surveillance of the key activists who follow in Minke's footsteps. Pangemanann is a conflicted soul: educated in France, he has risen to high office and enjoys the status he has acquired, but he admires Minke and his ambitions for an independent Indonesia. Nevertheless, to maintain his own position, he must corrupt his personal values and work with the Dutch authorities to sabotage the movement. He delegates authority to beat up opposition figures; he spreads divisive rumours; he incites race riots; he tortures detainees; and — while he doesn't get his own hands dirty — he is involved in murder too.

While the point of this is to show that the independence movement withered for decades because it was sabotaged from within by the very Native Indonesians that Tirto Adi Suryo was keen to unite, this doesn't make for a very engaging novel. Truth be told, I made heavy weather of it and resorted to reading a chapter a day to get it finished. I didn't abandon it despite the temptation because it was Book 4 of a significant quartet and I wanted to complete it.

Pangemanann enjoys dissecting the divisions within society which fracture the independence movement.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/05/29/house-of-glass-the-buru-quartet-4-by-pramoed...… (més)