Book Club of the Month featuring This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Transcript National Public Radio (NPR) Show: Talk of the Nation broadcast nation-wide in U.S. on approx. 300 affiliated radio stations Thursday, November 18, 1999 [2 - 3 P.M.]
ANCHOR: MELINDA PENKAVA
MELINDA PENKAVA, host:
This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Melinda Penkava.
This month's Book Club of the Air is a book that still is banned in the writer's homeland. The book is "This Earth of Mankind" by Indonesian writer and former political prisoner Pramoedya Ananta Toer. And the story of how the book came to be itself is the stuff of storytelling. It is the first of his "Buru Quartet," so named for the prison where Toer spent 14 years. He wrote "This Earth of Mankind" while in prison, and before he was allowed to lay it out on paper, he'd worked out the story by telling it in installments to his fellow prisoners.
But "This Earth of Mankind" is not a narrative of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's travails as a leftist who was imprisoned when Suharto took over in 1965, though there are parallels that may be drawn. Rather, "This Earth of Mankind" takes place at the turn of the past century, 1898, when Java was still being ruled by the Dutch and talk of independence was barely a whisper. It is the story of Minke, the only native Javanese in his Dutch high school, an ace student, a writer. Armed with that European education, he faces head-on the injustices of colonial rule and injustices that one finds in hierarchies everywhere.
The complexities in this book seem fitting to talk about these days, given the challenges for democracy in today's Indonesia. And if you've read Pramoedya Ananta Toer's "This Earth of Mankind" and want to talk about it, well, join us for our Book Club of the Air. The number's 1 (800) 989-8255, 1 (800) 989-TALK. The e-mail address is totn@npr.org.
With us for the hour is William Schwalbe, who is executive editor at Hyperion Books and the US publisher of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's memoir, as well as the "Buru Quartet." "This Earth of Mankind" is the first book in that series. He also helped organize Pramoedya's 1998 visit to the United States. And Will Schwalbe joins us from NPR's New York bureau. Welcome to TALK OF THE NATION.
Mr. WILLIAM SCHWALBE (Executive Editor, Hyperion Books): Thanks very much.
PENKAVA: And if you would like to join us for our Book Club of the Air, again, the number's 1 (800) 989-8255, 1 (800) 989-TALK. E-mail is totn@npr.org.
Well, Will Schwalbe, what do you take away from this book more than anything else?
Mr. SCHWALBE: Well, I think that this book can be read on several levels, and, in fact, needs to be read on several levels. At first when you're reading it, you're caught up in a tremendous story. This is really, at once, an intimate story. It's the story of a young man making his way in the world, but it's also a story that really involves all the forces that form the century we live in now. And so it's both intimate and epic and it's a story where, in the person of this young man, we see really the formulation of a modern consciousness and the birth of a new nation.
PENKAVA: And, of course, taking place when that nation, they were just starting to talk about independence, if I'm not mistaken. It was rather radical to discuss that.
Mr. SCHWALBE: It was very radical. It is also a profoundly anti-colonial novel. But one of the amazing things about it, and about Pramoedya's vision and humanity is in the book it's not just about the evils of colonialism. There's also the evils of feudalism. Minke's parents, who are Javanese sort of overlords in their community, represent a force that is as constraining to Minke as the Dutch colonialists.
PENKAVA: Mm-hmm. 1 (800) 989-8255; 1 (800) 989-TALK is our number. We're talking with our Book Club of the Air--with Will Schwalbe. The book of the month is "This Earth of Mankind" by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. And if you'd like to join us, again, the number's 1 (800) 989-8255.
Well, this is a book that is still banned in Indonesia, officially.
Mr. SCHWALBE: It's incredible that it is, like all of Pramoedya's books, still banned. It's especially amazing given the recent changes in government that have occurred there. The rationale for banning the books was bizarrely convoluted. Pramoedya was, of course, imprisoned and exiled and sent to Buru island prison camp for being associated with an organization that was associated with leftist organizations. And the attorney general banned these novels in particular, but really all his works, on the basis that they were spreading Communist propaganda--was the charge against them. But what was wonderfully bizarre about the charge was that the attorney general said because he could find no Communist propaganda in the books, it must be spreading them surreptitiously, and therefore was even more dangerous.
PENKAVA: Oh, a subtle writer, was he?
Mr. SCHWALBE: Very subtle, exactly. There was a couple of sentences, too, pulled out of context. There's one point one of the characters says, 'Oh, that's the way it is in the world, the big fish eat the little ones,' and this was held to be an example of Marxist dialectic.
PENKAVA: Well, getting back to the book in question, "This Earth of Mankind," it opens up with him, in chapter one, 'People call me Minke, my own name. For the time being, I need not tell it.' And that's a point of this story, how he got that name. And it is about labeling and such. And we do have an excerpt here that he reveals a few pages later in the book about how it was that he got his name.
Mr. SCHWALBE: 'It was, of course, not my idea that my name be or that people should call me Minke. I, too, had been amazed by how it had happened. It is a bit of an involved story. It started when I was still at ELS and did not know a word of Dutch. Mr. Ben Ruspoon(ph), my very first teacher, was always cross with me. I could never answer his questions. I always ended up crying. Yet every day a servant escorted me to that hated school. I was stuck in first class for two years. Mr. Ruspoon remained cross with me and I remained scared of him. But by the time the new school year arrived, my Dutch was somewhat better. My friends had all gone up to second class; I stayed in first class. I was seated between two Dutch girls who were always making trouble and annoying me. One one occasion, one of the girls that sat beside me, Vera, pinched my thigh as hard as she could as a way of getting acquainted. I screamed in pain. Mr. Ruspoon's eyes popped out frighteningly and he yelled, "Quiet, you minke." From that day, everyone in the class called me Minke, the one and only native.'
PENKAVA: A reading from the book "This Earth of Mankind" by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Will Schwalbe is our guest for this hour, the Book Club of the Air. The number's 1 (800) 989-8255, 1 (800) 989-TALK. And it takes him a while to realize what he's being called here.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Yeah, it does. It's astonishing it takes him a while to realize he's being called a monkey, and that here he's the only native student in the entire school, this Dutch language school, this colonial school and the teacher is calling him an animal.
PENKAVA: Now is he terribly naive? Because, you know, by the time--he's talking about something that happened several years earlier, of course, when he started in this Dutch school. But is he terribly naive? Because the book is told from his perspective here, and he seems to be taking in a whole lot of information and sharing that with us as he's going along, as though his eyes are being opened.
Mr. SCHWALBE: His eyes are definitely being opened, and he is naive. At the start of this book, he is head over heels in love with the West. The West is glorious. It's the mother of all invention and science and learning and technology. He's in love with the queen of the Netherlands. He just can't get enough of the West. And one of the most heartbreaking things about this book is to see how the West repays him for this love.
PENKAVA: And how does that happen?
Mr. SCHWALBE: It happens in a really terrible betrayal. This is, at its heart, a love story. You mentioned the wonderful genesis of this book, the fact that it was told in installments to the prisoners who shared Pramoedya's hut on Buru Island. And he really set out to craft a love story that would be so involving for them that it would give them something to look forward to. So we see this incredible love affair develop between Minke and a beautiful mixed-race girl named Annelies. And what happens at the end of this book is the system conspires to really devastatingly cruelly snatch Annelies not only away from Minke, but away from everything she knows and loves.
PENKAVA: Now Annelies is a very, very frail creature who very much needs--wouldn't you say--I mean, physically frail and very much needs Minke to survive.
Mr. SCHWALBE: She's very frail. She's almost too pure for the world. One of the most beautiful scenes in the book--it's my favorite scene--and I don't usually cry at books, but I sob whenever I read this scene--is where Minke tells her a story, a fairy tale, and casts her as the princess in it, and that's a fairly standard literary trope, but in Pramoedya's hands, and given the characters, it's so beautiful, because she really is a fairy tale princess. She's a little too delicate for the world.
PENKAVA: Now it's her--she is biracial there, and that is something that he very much talks about. He talks about the Dutch rule in Java at that time, but how there are these hierarchies below it, that it's not--it's very much ruled from the top by the Dutch, but even below it there are these hierarchies that happen, depending on your race and your class.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Tremendously complex interweaving of race, of class and of language. Language plays a great role in this book. And there's constant mention throughout of what language people are speaking and what they're speaking to each other. And one of the great tests for Minke in the story, as he's trying to become a writer, is what language should he write in.
PENKAVA: Because he's very, very fluent in Dutch and....
Mr. SCHWALBE: He's very fluent in Dutch. His mother writes him at one point and says, though, 'Why don't you write in Javanese,' which would be the local dialect. Then there's the whole question of Malay, which was the kind of lingua franca of the Indonesian islands, or the Dutch East Indies at the time. And he's trying to choose a language to write in not just as a practical matter, but as a way of deciding, really, who is he going to be. And the thing the reader needs to remember is that the tetralogy is written in Indonesian and Indonesian is an essentially created language based on Malay that is the language that pulls together the Dutch East Indies. and Pramoedya's choice not to write in Dutch but to write in Indonesian is a profoundly nationalist choice.
PENKAVA: Now, of course, he attracts the attention of some of the colonists of the Dutch there in Java and gets their attention because of his writings and his perspicacity and such, and he seems to be a very bright young man. Those are the folks that--does he trust them entirely, do you think, or is it, as time goes along, is he deciding that maybe he can't trust anybody?
Mr. SCHWALBE: I think that's a very good way of putting it. He tends, the character, to trust quickly. But again, when this speaks of the subtlety of Pramoedya's vision in creating this, a lot of the characters are worthy of his trust. There's a wonderful character who is a French colonial soldier painter who's raising his little girl and sharing living quarters with Minke, who is really one of the solid characters in the book. He's always there for Minke. And so you get this great complex range of characters--good Indonesian characters, not so good Indonesian characters, evil colonial characters, wonderfully supportive colonial characters.
PENKAVA: In fact, we have a selection here where he is noticed by an official in his hometown.
Mr. SCHWALBE: 'Minke, if you maintain your present attitude, I mean your European attitude, not a slavish attitude like most Javanese, perhaps one day you will be an important person. You can become a leader, a pioneer, an example to your race. You, as an educated person, surely understand that your people have fallen very low, humiliatingly low. Europeans can no longer do anything to help. The natives themselves must begin to do something. "His words hurt. Yes, every time the essence of Java was insulted, offended by outsiders, my feelings were also hurt. I felt so totally Javanese. But when the ignorance and stupidity of Java was mentioned, I felt European."'
PENKAVA: A selection from Pramoedya Ananta Toer's "This Earth of Mankind," which is this month's Book Club of the Air. If you'd like to join us, we're talking this hour with Will Schwalbe, who is an executive editor at Hyperion Books and who was the US publisher of Ananta Toer's memoir and the "Buru Quartet." And we will get to your calls at 1 (800) 989-8255, 1 (800) 989-TALK. That's the number if you'd like to join the Book Club of the Air, if you've read Pramoedya Ananta Toer's "This Earth of Mankind." The e-mail address is totn@npr.org.
At 21 minutes past the hour, it's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
(Soundbite of music)
PENKAVA: Welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Melinda Penkava. Today's the November meeting of our Book Club of the Air. This month we've been reading "This Earth of Mankind" by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer. If you've read the book or have a question and want to be part of the discussion, the number is 1 (800) 989-8255, 1 (800) 989-TALK. Later on we'll be giving out the list of books that we're going to be reading over the next few months. That's coming up later in the program, so you have a chance to get your pencil and paper ready.
Our book buddy today is Will Schwalbe, executive editor at Hyperion Books and the US publisher of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's memoir, as well as the "Buru Quartet." "This Earth of Mankind" is the first book in that series. Will Schwalbe also helped organized Pramoedya Ananta Toer's 1998 visit to the US.
Again, our number's 1 (800) 989-8255, 1 (800) 989-TALK. We'll go to Rebecca in Fairfax, Virginia. Hi, Rebecca.
REBECCA (Caller): Hi. I just had a question. I read the book last summer and enjoyed it a lot. I was sitting on the beach. And I was wondering if the fact that he told it orally, composed it orally rather than writing it down, had any influence on the way it was written and if he has written other things since then just in the normal way of writing...
PENKAVA: When he would be allowed to.
REBECCA: ...and if the editor sees a difference.
PENKAVA: Will Schwalbe?
Mr. SCHWALBE: Well, yeah, I'd love to address that, but I'd first be curious, did you feel there was an oral quality to it when you were reading it?
REBECCA: Yes, I did. I did. In fact, I don't have the book with me, but I noted it several times. And I was inspired by the little blurb in the edition about how he told it to his fellow inmates and they would gather paper for him and stuff to write part of it. So it wasn't clear how much of it was actually composed orally, or in his head, and how much was actually written down. But it seemed to me it had a different quality to it, and I don't know if it was the translation or just his personal style or if it's because it was written orally.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Well, I would actually agree with you that there is something special, there is an oral quality. I'll explain briefly. He composed the entire thing orally and then he wrote it down from his memory of what he composed orally.
REBECCA: Uh-huh. Uh-huh. I see.
Mr. SCHWALBE: So it benefits in some ways both from the best of the oral tradition as well as from the best of the written tradition.
REBECCA: Uh-huh. That was one of the most striking things about the book. I mean, first of all, it's very exotic for me, because I don't know anything about Indonesia. But also the prose, just the style of the prose is very different. I really enjoyed it a lot.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Did you find...
REBECCA: Thanks for publishing it.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Oh, oh, oh, I'm not so--my favorite book in the world, actually. Did you find yourself very caught up in the story?
REBECCA: Yeah, I only read the first one, and I went to the bookstore to get the second one and, of course, it wasn't there and it wasn't in the library. So I'm going to school now, but it's next on my list. I want to find out what happens to the young girl and, you know--yeah, it has--but I think it's definitely--to me, it's a story as a fabliau, it's an oral story, and I think that's the most endearing quality about it. And as far as--the political sections seem to be kind of--perhaps when he sat down and started writing it--I mean, they're really heartfelt. But it seemed like they were kind of tacked in there.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Yeah.
REBECCA: The story itself is political, and he didn't really need to put in not really propaganda, but he didn't need to add the political stuff, and I suspect he added that after he was out of jail and writing it down. Because certainly his fellow prisoners, you know, wouldn't need a lecture on politics in Indonesia.
PENKAVA: Now which politics in--Rebecca, which...
REBECCA: There are some short passages in the book, especially toward the end, that are just about the political situation, and it seemed to me that maybe he added those on.
Mr. SCHWALBE: It's interesting. I mean, I think one of the things he was trying to do in the story with that is re-create a time when people were desperately engaged in politics, too. But by its very nature, those sections are so much in--less compelling than the plot, which is--it's such an involving plot...
REBECCA: Right.
Mr. SCHWALBE: ...that they do sometimes, even when they're integral, have a little bit of the feel of something inserted. I can definitely see how you would feel that way reading.
REBECCA: Yeah. And the power of the story of Minke as a--What is he? Is he Javanese, is he European? That's a powerful political message, so it didn't seem like it was necessary. But I can see, given his life, that he would write it in there, because it really is a heartfelt passage.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Yeah. It's also something Minke is grappling with as a character.
REBECCA: Exactly. Yeah.
Mr. SCHWALBE: He's trying to figure out to what extent he has to be or doesn't have to be political. And in a way I think Pramoedya would argue, and I would argue, too, that the political is inextricably bound with life and Minke finds out that he has to be political. And that's one of the things that happens over the course of "This Earth of Mankind."
PENKAVA: Because the colonial rule there very much ruled his everyday life, especially toward the end.
REBECCA: It's always there. It's always there. Yeah, it's always present. It's like this looming presence. Is it at all autobiographical?
Mr. SCHWALBE: It's actually based quite extensively on the life of an early Indonesian pioneer of nationalism called Tirto, but, yes, of course, it is also very autobiographical. Not in terms of any of the details...
REBECCA: Right.
Mr. SCHWALBE: ...but in terms of a kind of evolution of thought.
REBECCA: Right, the evolution of awareness.
PENKAVA: Hold on there, Rebecca. We have John here with us as well. Hi, John. Welcome to the Book Club of the Air.
JOHN (Caller): Hi, this is John. I'm out in Plateville, Wisconsin. And...
REBECCA: Ah-ha.
JOHN: Pardon?
PENKAVA: I think she said, 'Ah-ha.'
JOHN: Oh. Earlier the publisher mentioned about the relationships between the colonials and the natives, and I was so fascinated I wondered if he could address that a little more. Annelies' mother, which she was Indonesian, you know, married to a Dutch planter...
REBECCA: Yeah.
JOHN: ...and she--you know, he had the family back home in the Netherlands and was still married to her. But she, out here, carried on his business when he was sort of a drunken sot and was the strong one and kept his finances in good shape. And then later, you know, when she tried to get what she felt was rightfully hers because of her native background, she was totally, totally cut out from any rights at all.
PENKAVA: Well, she hadn't been--she was a concubine. She had not been married...
JOHN: Right.
PENKAVA: ...and the rule of Dutch law just came down against her all around.
JOHN: But it seemed like such a...
REBECCA: She was a survivor.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Yeah. There's also another thing, which speaks of that. The courts literally didn't recognize her in the novel.
REBECCA: Right.
Mr. SCHWALBE: That not only did they not recognize her because she was a concubine, but they didn't recognize her because she was a native. And the only reason that Minke is allowed to speak in court, and be essentially recognized, is a special privilege granted by the Dutch colonial authority that could be taken away at whim at any time. And that's very true to the history of that period.
PENKAVA: Was that because of his high birth in Javanese society, because he was...
Mr. SCHWALBE: It was because of his high birth in Javanese society and his education.
REBECCA: Yeah. Yeah. That came across pretty clearly. I'm going to have to listen to the rest of this on the air, because I'm going into my town of Vienna where the cell phone doesn't work very well. I really enjoyed the book, and I can't wait to read the rest of the quartet. Thanks a lot.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Oh...
PENKAVA: Rebecca, thanks for being there.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Thank you.
REBECCA: Bye--bye.
PENKAVA: Well, stick around, John, and we're also joined now by Sherry in New York. Hi, Sherry.
SHERRY (Caller): Hi. I'm obsessed by the minute attention to the racial distinctions by the suppositions that surround what it means to be a native, what it means to be an Indo, by which I suppose--I suppose Indo and Eurasian are the same?
Mr. SCHWALBE: Yes.
SHERRY: I guess I'm asking Will this. And what it means to be European, i.e., pure blood and the notions that seem to go along with this about where you stand, literally, in the human hierarchy. And, of course, the Dutch were very brutal in Indonesia, and they're very brutal with Annelies and they're very brutal, actually, throughout the whole of the quartet. You can see it in various ways, not just in the treatment of Annelies.
And it's interesting in the fourth volume, incidentally, which has to do with a native informer who is the narrator, as it is in Minke's generation and the various aspects of Minke's story. What I wanted to ask is this: When you hear the Indonesians talking about Timorese, you have the impression the Timorese are the Indonesians' quote, unquote, "natives," less educated, less developed, inferior. I wanted to know if the brutality and the caste system hadn't in some sense penetrated Indonesian thinking, and doesn't this further explode what I think Pramoedya would agree is the myth of Asian values, that the West is imposing its human rights, its tolerance. The West is, essentially, if anything, undoing what the West itself initially taught, and what the Indonesians would seem to have learned all too well, making their fine distinctions between the different races and the castes attached to them.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Well, I think when one speaks of the Indonesians, the...
SHERRY: Javanese, I suppose, in the ...(unintelligible).
Mr. SCHWALBE: There's the Javanese and the Balinese and Madurese and the Otenese(ph) and the Sundanese, so I don't think it is fair to say that the Indonesians, for example, see the Timorese the way that the Dutch colonialists saw the Indonesians, and the Dutch did sort of lump everybody together who wasn't either mixed blood or pure blood, of course. But one could argue--I mean, I think one of the things in this novel is Pramoedya in many ways compares the Javanese feudalism to the colonialism in terms of the power and the arrogance, and I think the attitude towards the Timorese, who were a colonized people, does--there's some very interesting parallels that Pramoedya, especially now, has been very conscious of, because he's been someone who has been extremely outspoken ever since released from prison, on the plight and occupation of East Timor.
SHERRY: Right. And you can see in "The Mute Soliloquy," though unfortunately I haven't seen either in English or in French, which is the other European language that I read, anything that he might have said about the Timorese, and so, unless--I suppose, unless you can read Bahasa Indonesian, you wouldn't have had access to it, but has he ever made any other comment...
Mr. SCHWALBE: He actually--he wrote an op ed for The New York Times a couple of years ago...
SHERRY: Op ed?
Mr. SCHWALBE: ...protesting the occupation of East Timor.
SHERRY: But nothing in the recent onslaught.
Mr. SCHWALBE: He's given extensive interviews. He's almost completely blocked in terms of his writing, and so when a piece by Pramoedya appears, it's usually a very short piece of the way of an op ed or something, and--but he's given extensive interviews, and in fact, never lets an interview go by without mentioning East Timor.
PENKAVA: 1 (800) 989-8255; 1 (800) 989-TALK is our number. We're talking about Pramoedya Ananta Toer's "This Earth of Mankind." Our guest for the hour is Will Schwalbe. If you'd like to join the conversation, the number is 1 (800) 989-8255; 1 (800) 989-TALK.
When you say he's blocked, Will Schwalbe, is it--you're not talking about writer's block. You're talking about the government restricting what it was he could say, or...
Mr. SCHWALBE: No, I'm actually--it's been a kind of a writer's block. One of the things that he mentions, and he laughs when he says it, it sounds so absurd, but he said that the two greatest enemies of his being able to write are the telephone and the doorbell. And now that he's, you know, out of his 14-year imprisonment, he's just the locus of a flood of foreign visitors, and literally, it keeps him from writing.
PENKAVA: Mm-hmm. Now Ruth is with us as well. Hi, there, Ruth. Welcome to the show.
RUTH (Caller): Hi. This is Ruth from Burnsville, North Carolina. I'm not from here, but this is where I live.
PENKAVA: OK.
RUTH: I was fascinated--I love your TALK OF THE NATION, and I was fascinated with the topic, because I was in Java with my family during the war, and I was in Japanese prison camp for three years. And our family and myself were outraged by the treatment of the Javanese by the Dutch and their whole sort of--their whole philosophy about these quite extraordinary people. And what I particularly want to know is, during what time frame did Ananta Toer write this book, "This Earth of Mankind"? What were the years? I know that he wrote about the 1890s or whatever, but when did he physically write this?
Mr. SCHWALBE: Well, he was--prior to his arrest and imprisonment in 1965, he was working on a biography of this figure on whom Minke is based, so that would have been in the early '60s. Then in the first couple of years of his imprisonment, he was held in various places around Java, so he wouldn't have started it until the early '70s, '73, I think, or '71 was the year he credits himself as having spoken it. And then it was the second half of his imprisonment where he was allowed actually to write it down. So it was completed in writing between then and 1979.
RUTH: So he...
PENKAVA: And you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
RUTH: So he's basically a man in his 40s now, 40s, 50s?
PENKAVA: Oh, no.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Oh, no. He's 74 years old.
RUTH: OK. Now...
Mr. SCHWALBE: And he was actually also imprisoned by the Dutch, as a very young man...
RUTH: Was he?
Mr. SCHWALBE: ...when he was fighting for Indonesian independence.
RUTH: Really? OK, now can I--would you be good enough to give me an address where I could drop him a line?
Mr. SCHWALBE: You can write to him care of me, Will Schwalbe at the publisher, Hyperion, which is...
RUTH: How do you spell Schwalbe?
Mr. SCHWALBE: It's S-C-H-W-A-L-B-E.
RUTH: OK. At Hyperion...
Mr. SCHWALBE: And that's 114 Fifth Avenue...
RUTH: 114 Fifth Avenue.
Mr. SCHWALBE: And that's New York, 10011.
RUTH: 10011. A fascinating talk. Thank you so much.
PENKAVA: Thank you, Ruth.
RUTH: Bye-bye.
PENKAVA: OK. Sherry, John, or...
SHERRY: This is Sherry in New York once again. I have a simple question and a more complicated question. This is the simple question: Although his books are banned in Indonesia, they're both published in Indonesia and from what I can understand, they're fairly widely read. Are they circulated in something like a samizdat in Indonesia? And the complex question is, I believe I'm talk--can I talk a little bit about the fourth book--again, the fourth book is written by a native--well, no, I think an Indo--police agent, and that's what I wanted to ask you about. Is the narrator in the fourth book not an Eurasian? And could you talk a little bit about the relations both in life and in this tetralogy between the native and--that is to say, the Asian characters and the Eurasian, or mixed blood characters, Mr. Schwalbe.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Well, yeah. The--I'll try to take the questions in order. The books were published and then banned. So the first one was published, and banned 10 months later, and then they were banned in increasingly short periods of time. So the fourth was banned, essentially, on publication. When a book's banned in Indonesia, it means everyone is supposed to take their copy and give it to the police. So the books are banned, and have been since pretty close to their inception. There are estimates that upwards of a half a million samizdat copies, or Xeroxed copies, of each volume exist, and there's a wonderful story--I'll just--quickly--which is during one of Pramoedya's interrogations with the attorney general, or someone in the attorney general's office, it was a multi-hour interrogation that ended with one final question, which is: 'Will you sign this samizdat copy of my--of your book? My wife is one of your biggest fans.'
As far as your question about the fourth volume, it's a fascinating thing, and what he does is, the first three volumes of the tetralogy are written by Minke. That's the conceit of the book, is this is Minke's writing. At the end of the third volume, Minke is sent off into exile. The fourth volume is ostensibly written by the mixed-race police officer who has been looking at Minke, observing Minke, and is in many ways responsible for his exile. And now he's reading Minke's story, and telling his own story of what happens, and what is brilliant about this, to my eye, is it puts the reader in the role of that person. OK, you've read these three volumes. What are you going to do about it?
PENKAVA: And you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION's Book Club of the Air. I'm Melinda Penkava. Our guest is Will Schwalbe, and we have to take a short break right now, but when we come back, we'll continue talking about "This Earth of Mankind," by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer. The number is 1 (800) 989-8255; 1 (800) 989-TALK. If you'd like to join the conversation, again, the number's 1 (800) 989-8255; 1 (800) 989-TALK. E-mail address is totn@npr.org.
At 40 minutes past the hour, it's TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News.
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PENKAVA: Welcome back to TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Melinda Penkava.
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Today on TALK OF THE NATION, it's the November Book Club of the Air. Our selection is "This Earth of Mankind," by Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer. Our book buddy for the hour is Will Schwalbe, who is executive editor at Hyperion Books, and the US publisher of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's memoir, "The Buru Quartet." "The Earth of Mankind" is the first in that series.
We still have some time left, so if you'd like to join the conversation, the number's 1 (800) 989-8255; 1 (800) 989-TALK. We have an e-mail here as well, and if you'd like to send an e-mail, it's totn@npr.org. This is from Shawn in Northampton, Mass., who writes: 'Minke struggles to negotiate a position between his Javanese heritage and his European education. He's in the front lines of the Indonesian confrontation with colonialism and modernity. But how do contemporary Indonesians see the form of the novel itself? There are a lot of narrative theatrical traditions throughout the region, such as shadow puppet theater, but the novel is a comparatively recent way to tell stories.' And Shawn asks if--'Does it appeal to a wide spectrum of Indonesians regardless of cultural or economic background?'
I'm going to toss that one to you, Will Schwalbe.
Mr. SCHWALBE: OK. That's a very provocative question. One of our last callers had asked a question about the samizdat distribution of these books, and something I thought bears mentioning, because it speaks to this question, is three students were arrested and charged with subversion for having one copy of this book, "This Earth of Mankind," and they served more than six years each in prison. And what happened over the Suharto regime, and it's terrible oppression of freedom of expression, was they really made novels in Indonesia irrelevant, because the only novels that could be published didn't talk about anything that was of any interest, really, to anyone. So unfortunately I think these days among young Indonesians, they don't see the novel as being a particular powerful or meaningful mode of expression for them.
To some extent, plays have taken much more of that role, and that has, I think, something to do with the Suharto regime's oppression of the written word, but also it does speak to what our e-mailer points out is the tradition of shadow puppet theater and various other kinds of theatrical expression.
PENKAVA: Mm-hmm. 1 (800) 989-8255; 1 (800) 989-TALK. Mike is with us in Norfolk, Virginia. Hi, Mike.
MIKE (Caller): Yes. This is Mike in Norfolk. My question is--he talks about a twoness that Du Bois talked about he struggled against in terms of what he was going on in America, in terms of the black struggle. How relevant is this in terms of the American education that African-Americans have gotten in this society in terms of our struggle?
Mr. SCHWALBE: I think it has tremendous relevance. One of the very moving things for me as the editor of these books is the number of letters and the e-mails that I've gotten from African-American readers, and also from First Nation readers from Canada in particular who see this question of this separation of peoples and this social-cultural-linguistic apartheid as being directly--speaking directly to their experience. I'd be curious to hear ways in which you think it spoke to you in that way.
MIKE: Well, because I think that in a lot of sense, when you look at the struggle and you look at how far things have come, and you look at--basically when you just do a comparison overall, and you consider the fact that the struggle is still going on, and you look at your whole life in terms of how you fit to--how you struggle to fit into society and you struggle to just be treated equally, you know, as a human being, and you realize that you're not there yet even though 400 years of struggle have happened, and you still--the struggle--the twoness is still there. You're committed to America as a whole, but then when you look at some of the injustices, and some of the inequality and things still going on, that kind of gives you that, 'Well, are we ever going to get there or what?' You know, that's how it kind of makes you feel.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Yeah. I think also, I mean, this theme in this novel, and one of the most powerful plot points, is when he thinks he is there, in terms of acceptance, it's actually the courts that tell him, 'No, you're not. You're not equal.' And that, I think has some very interesting parallels, too.
MIKE: Right.
PENKAVA: And actually there's a scene, I think, that the concubine, who tells him, you know, in three sentences, you said, something to the effect that it was money that was going to rule in this situation here, and the people who had it were going to rule in the end.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I also--interesting in the memoir that we just published, "The Mute Soliloquy," which is about being taken to the prison island where he was a forced laborer, he speaks on the ship going over to this--he doesn't know where--prison island, being comforted by African-American spirituals that--I don't know how he knew them, but he knew them, and that's something that in his mind he's been a student of African-American history, and is fascinated to learn more about that and has made a lifelong study of it.
PENKAVA: Let's bring John in. Hi there, John.
JOHN (Caller): Hi. I'm in Seattle here. I wanted to ask a question; I was just thinking about this. The first comparison that came to my mind was "Dr. Zhivago," which was a novel that I thought--you know it was banned for many years, and people were oppressed terribly for having possessed it and read it. And I was wondering how it compared to this one in terms of--I guess its perception of the society from which it springs.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Hmm. I'm embarrassed to admit I've only seen the movie. I've never actually read "Dr. Zhivago."
JOHN: Well, I highly recommend it.
Mr. SCHWALBE: OK, thank you. I will do that.
JOHN: It's very compelling. I mean, behind it is a love story, as I'm sure you know, and in--but it is to some degree a chronicle of the revolution, and as you know, not an altogether flattering one. At the same time, it's not altogether flattering of the regime that the revolution replaced, either. And it was suppressed because--well, let's not talk about why, but I was thinking of this gentleman, who I'm now compelled to read, I think...
Mr. SCHWALBE: Good.
JOHN: ...again, being repressed and preparing this psychic chronicle, I guess, of the society and the changes, and how they would compare, I guess.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Yeah, and then he just...
JOHN: (Technical difficulty) comparison because you don't know the novel.
Mr. SCHWALBE: An interesting point--I don't know if this helps at all, but one of the astonishing things about this novel is that it was both oppressed later when it came out, but it was written from, in some ways, the ultimate oppression. I mean it was written from the vantage point of a guy who had truly been silenced, that on the prison island--this is something he talks about in "The Mute Soliloquy"--if you were caught even with newspaper, and some fish or something had come wrapped in a scrap of newspaper, one of the prisoners was caught with that newspaper and his body was found floating in the water the next day. So...
JOHN: Well, the...
Mr. SCHWALBE: ...you couldn't read or write under pain of death on Buru Island when Pramoedya composed this, and part of the joy of the book--because it is--we keep talking about political oppression, but it is a very joyful book, too, is just the excitement about language and storytelling.
PENKAVA: I'd like to bring Pierce in here now. Hi, Pierce.
PIERCE (Caller): Oh, yes. This is Pierce in San Francisco. This may sound trivial, but I was disturbed by what I thought were mistakes in grammar and punctuation and spelling in the book. For example there were a lot of run-ons, which is OK, but then after the run-ons would be a semicolon, which...
PENKAVA: Is this a pet peeve of yours, Pierce?
PIERCE: Pardon?
PENKAVA: Is misuse of the semicolon a pet peeve of yours?
PIERCE: Yes.
PENKAVA: OK.
PIERCE: So is use of the run-ons.
PENKAVA: Well, here's your chance to talk to the editor.
Mr. SCHWALBE: OK. I think we can have a lively debate, because I'm in love with semicolons. I'm big on semicolons. I think if you--you might consider this answer a bit of a cop-out, but I'll give it anyway. One of the things Max Lane, the translator did, and I definitely was taken with this, was tried to create the language of someone not writing in their own language, and so there is a slightly formal quality, too, that Max I think very successfully recreated. Formal's the wrong word--a slightly naive quality, that's the word I would use.
PIERCE: I see. Also, the use of, for example, 'I was taller than her.' I think it should be 'than she.' And this happened many times.
Mr. SCHWALBE: So I'll chalk up some of them to my missing it with the red pencil, but I'll also--there was a conscious effort to create this slightly naive, slightly formal language, the way that you--people who speak English beautifully but it may not have been their first language.
PIERCE: Uh-huh.
JOHN: Well, how would this compare--this is John in Seattle again--how about "Cry the Beloved Country," which has that kind of an idiosyncratic sort of speechlike or analog.
PENKAVA: Placed in South Africa.
Mr. SCHWALBE: I think that's a very nice comparison, yeah.
PENKAVA: Mm-hmm. And you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION, from NPR News.
PIERCE: Thank you very much.
PENKAVA: OK. Thanks, Pierce.
PIERCE: Bye-bye.
PENKAVA: We'll be on the lookout for those semicolons.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Yes, I know. I'll be more careful in the future. I do appreciate that.
PENKAVA: I wonder if it comes back to that idea of the origins of this that we spoke about earlier this hour, Will, that this was a book that he told in installments, almost like a Charles Dickens--you know, giving you the serial--to his fellow prisoners. And...
Mr. SCHWALBE: It wasn't...
PENKAVA: And the word--and he'd tell a few, and then they would tell others in the work details, till--was it--like thousands of people were informed about his latest installment.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Twenty thousand people, and it would start with just the 20 or so people with whom he shared his kind of makeshift hut. And many said afterwards that waiting for the next installment was the only thing that gave them the will to live. And I think that there--he set out to craft something with urgency. He's also--audience, of those 20,000, there were, you know, literally kids, 14-year-olds who had gone to tell their daddy something in prison and were hauled off to the prison camp with their fathers. So his audience ranged from teen-agers through people in their 70s and 80s. So he had to craft a story that would really be a page-turner.
One of my favorite comments about the book came from Carolyn See in her review, who said, you know, "Where are the miniseries people?" That was her quote.
PENKAVA: Let's go to Margaret, who we can get in, in this last minute or so. Hi, Margaret.
MARGARET (Caller): Hi. I'm from Ann Arbor, and I had a chance to read all four of the books before the recent history took such a radical turn, and I felt extremely lucky to have this insight into the country as it sort of popped up onto the world stage, and a marvelous book. So it's really just my--and when I heard that you were going to speak about it on the radio, I said, 'Oh, I hope I catch this program.'
PENKAVA: What did you like about it most?
MARGARET: I thought the use of language as a sort of description for the classification of the population was really great, the way he used--said, you know, now he's speaking in French, and now he's speaking in Indonesian, and when he go home and talk to this mother, she couldn't read the pieces that he'd written. I thought that was just very striking.
PENKAVA: Well, Margaret, thank you for your call.
MARGARET: OK.
PENKAVA: And Will Schwalbe, thank you so much for joining us today.
Mr. SCHWALBE: Oh, well thank you for having me.
PENKAVA: Will Schwalbe is executive editor at Hyperion Books, and US publisher of Pramoedya Ananta Toer's memoir and "The Buru Quartet." He joined us from our New York bureau. Want to thank everybody who called today as well.
Now if you have your pencils ready, we're ready to give you that list of books we're going to be reading over the next few months. With the coming of the millennium, well, we thought "Brave New World" would be a good choice, and that's our selection for December 23rd; "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley. "A Passage to India" is our selection for January 20th, by E.M. Forster. And "Their Eyes Were Watching God," by Zora Neale Hurston. That's on February 17th.
Again, "Brave New World," by Aldous Huxley in December; "A Passage to India," by E.M Forster in January, and "Their Eyes Were watching God," by Zora Neale Hurston, in February.
PENKAVA: In Washington, I'm Melinda Penkava, NPR News.