Customer Reviews

Footsteps (Buru Quartet)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As we follow the developing story of Minke, we watch his footsteps leave the place of the former story and begin to explore the outside world through the study of medicine. It is clear that this study will yield for him government employment and the opportunity to help his fellow people. At the same time this is happening, he is constantly aware and being made more aware by those around him of his own people and how little he knows about them since his preference for Dutch language and education i.e. the filter of colonialism prioritizes everything and weights it in a certain manner. Influences from a developing China, the Philippines and a budding new anticolonial spirit begin to flourish in the greater environment and bring freshness, humility and depth to concepts previously understood only in a colonial fashion. In Footsteps we watch Minke grow in consciousness, develop leadership skills and independence and begin to listen to a different drummer both in terms of who his people are, and what he might best do, for them and with them. His path is changed and word by word, experience by experience, we are present at the birth of an organizer, a political journalist and a nationalist critic.

This is an extraordinary series , written by a man who spent many years on the island of Buru , as a political prisoner , during the years of Suharto . The books were confiscated and burned . He remembered them by telling the stories to other prisoners and eventually smuggling them out . Pram would have won the Nobel if it weren't for the Suharto leftovers still wanting business as usual . I read the series in one sitting years ago and bought this set for a friend .

This book is a great novel about Dutch occupation of Indonesia. Very interesting and good history presented in novel form.

I agree that this third book of the great Buru Quartet should not be read first, as it would be not make sense, and therefore might be boring. Yet, it is the necessary transition between the early life of Minke (Toer's alter ego) in books 1 and 2, and the final summary book, House of Glass. It covers the important period when Menke becomes convinced that he must lead his people against the oppression of the Dutch Government, which he does by the power of the pen. I read 4 first - then 1,2,and 3, and I think this actually may work better than reading them 1,2,3,4. Taken as a whole, the Buru Quartet is a powerful, magnificent work, and we can see why it was earlier banned. It is an education in the history and culture of Indonesia, combined with several touching love stories, concentrating on the people of the Island of Java. The books may be more enjoyable if you are familiar with Java and more educational if you are not. Either way, even if read just as a novel, the writing is superb.

"Footsteps" is not the first novel you want to read by PA Toer. It should be the third. PAT is a great writer, no doubt; it's a shame he was never awarded the Nobel Prize that he deserved. As for "F", it does not have the edge that the first two novels in his famed Buru Quartet - "This Earth of Mankind" and "Child of all Nations" - have. It's not a stretch to say that reading "F" is like watching the third Godfather movie: it just doesn't have it; but you watch anyway. And so I read it. It reads more like a slow-paced political history of Indonesia, and the best parts are when characters from "TEOM" and "COAN" make an appearance. I will definitely read the fourth book in the series. PAT is writer that you can't help but admire, but "F" just didn't resonate the way his other novels did (for me).