Pramoedya Ananta Toer has been compared to John Steinbeck (The Washington Post), Nadine Gordimer (The Nation), and Charles Dickens (Publishers Weekly). He shares with Naguib Mahfouz the ability to "achieve what few writers today are able to accomplish: drawing the reader, body and soul, into another world" (Seattle Times). But the Chicago Tribune's comparison to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is particularly apt. Not only is Pramoedya a writer of staggering depth and power, he is also one of his country's most suppressed dissidents. All his work is banned in his native Indonesia; students have been sentenced to eight years in prison on charges stemming from an arrest for selling his books. 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 is the second in the series of four novels often called the Buru tetralogy. Many of the characters from This Earth of Mankind (the first volume) return to stunning effect in Child of All Nations. But this is a novel that can also be read entirely on its own.The Buru tetralogy was composed orally on Buru Island during the first half of the author's fourteen-year imprisonment without trial. Writing or reading anything but religious texts was strictly forbidden. Pramoedya would tell each installment to the people with whom he shared h
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
I want to correct a serious error in the last sentence of the first review posted on this page. It says that Toer's books "are banned in his native MALAYSIA." This is not the correct country. Toer is a native of INDONESIA, and the Buru quartet chronicles the emotional, political and social emergence of that nation. I met the author when I had the opportunity to translate for him during his trip to the US in 1999 -- I strongly feel that he would want people to know that his country is Indonesia!
By Angela Puddu
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I am on the third book of the Buru quartet. I have a great passion in reading books of countries where I have been on holiday. I really enjoyed it because I learnt a lot about history and colonisation in Indonesia. Pramoedya Ananta Toer is a great writer, he writes in a way and describes characters that reading his books for me it is like to watch a movie. I am very upset because I love collecting the books I read and enjoy, unfortunately I have lost the book Child of Nations, left on the plane last July when I went on holiday to Italy. I asked at the lost and found office at the airport and they asked me to pay £20.00 to get the book back. Thieves! If anybody doesn't want to keep the book after reading it please let me know and I give you the address where to deliver to and pay for the deliver.
Thank you.
Angela
Thank you.
Angela
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Pramoedya's ability to illustrate the conflicts among the pure Javanese natives, half-breed Indos, and the Dutch colonialist masters is nothing short of phenomenal. The rights of the natives proved to be meaningless when it came face to face against the greeds of the colonial masters.
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