THE MUTE'S SOLILOQUY
By Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Hyperion. 374 pp. $27.50
Reviewed by Wendy Law-Yone
Every book, as a rule, should be judged on its own merit; yet every once in a while there comes a book to challenge that rule. Here is one by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia's most prominent and prolific novelist. Pramoedya is best known for the Buru Quartet, a series spanning the years between the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the Dutch East Indies prior to Indonesia's emergence as an independent state. The novels' hero and narrator is the revolutionary Minke, a young Javanese journalist who struggles through the conflicts of ambition and identity and through the layered evils and complex social worlds of colonialism. The first two volumes of the Buru Quartet, This Earth of Mankind and Child of All Nations, appeared in Indonesia in 1979 and were soon bestsellers. Two years later, they were banned for spreading "Marxism-Leninism," a charge with chilling overtones since the mass phobia of 1965, when thousands of Indonesians suspected of being Communists were arrested and close to half a million slaughtered. Among those arrested in 1965 was Pramoedya, already a prominent journalist and novelist. As he was taken away, his painstakingly amassed library, including works-in-progress, was ransacked; later it was burned to ashes. Pramoedya had already spent two years in jail under the Dutch. This time his sentence was to last 14 years, four in Jakarta, 10 on the desolate penal colony of Buru Island, some 850 miles northeast of Java.
The Mute's Soliloquy is a selection of notes, essays and unsent letters to his children written during his two last years on Buru Island. Denied books and writing materials, Pramoedya relied on memory to reconstruct his lost research on the twilight of Dutch colonialism, which he then wove into stories to entertain his fellow prisoners -- "my lullaby," he once said, "to calm their fears."
Thus it fell to Pramoedya to recreate a history of one sort of colonization while living out the evils of another. From dawn to dark, hands swollen and bleeding, the prisoners hacked their way through jungle and swamp, with machetes so dull that "the grass wasn't felled but simply fell in faint." They fought off starvation by eating live lizards and worms, snakes and other vermin. They died of disease, for want of basic medicines; or were shot dead by guards; or crushed by falling trees. Child of All Nations, the first volume of the "told" novels to appear in print, ends with the lines "Buru Island Prison Camp, spoken 1973/ written 1975" -- reflecting a reprieve in Pramoedya's last two years of captivity, when the frail but irrepressible storyteller was finally given permission to write. As he recounts in The Mute's Soliloquy, Pramoedya's camp mates built him a room to write in, provided him with paper and extra food rations, and relieved him of his share of hard labor.
And write he did, completing a two-volume chronicle of his life and work (of which this book is only one part), plus four novels and one drama. He also resumed work on the Indonesian version of the Netherlands East Indies Encyclopedia, the research for which was burned in 1965. True to Pramoedya's Sisyphean trials, this second manuscript too was confiscated and destroyed, along with other drafts, before his sentence was up. On the evidence of The Mute's Soliloquy alone, one wonders if any other living writer has been subject to such relentless oppression, both human and literary.
It is an uneven book, haphazard in sequence, dull in parts, sometimes offhand about events that cry out for more detail -- but, for all that, memorable. The author's recollection of the Japanese occupation and the ensuing years of nation building is history unvarnished and recognizably true to life. As a self-portrait, it dares to be unflattering, telling it like it is. ("My childhood was one of enslavement by fear, ignorance, and illness.") As an ongoing chronicle of survival, it is plainly heroic. "This narrow path," Pramoedya writes in an epigraph elsewhere, "has been trod many a time already, it's only that this time the journey is one to mark the way." A modest claim, and characteristic; yet what is that marking of the way except the hero's journey?
Wendy Law-Yone is a novelist who last visited Indonesia as part of a human rights delegation.
© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company
.