[OPINION] 'Indonesia Out of Exile': Imagination and liberation

'This book is not easy to pigeonhole in terms of its genre. It is partly social history, partly a biography of a great writer, partly an intellectual adventure story.' Opinion ThoughtLeaders

The following is a review of “Indonesia Out of Exile: How Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet Killed a Dictatorship” by Max Lane, Penguin Books, 2022.

A progressive analysis of what led up to the events in 1965 and the “New Order” that followed was provided by Lane’s earlier book,, perhaps the finest social history of that tragic country. is about a brighter topic: how the novels of the acclaimed writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer contributed to the downfall of the Suharto dictatorship.

“I started to figure out ways to boost their [the prisoners’] spirit, because being imprisoned on this island was bad enough, we shouldn’t have to deal with low morale on top of it,” Pramoedya told Lane. “I still remember the first time I started storytelling. It was at night after working: on the veranda, the veranda for the barrack that we had built for ourselves. I was sitting on a bench that I made myself, the others were standing or sitting down, listening.

The sequels were banned shortly after they appeared. But the word was out that Pramoedya had come out with masterpieces, and people, especially a younger generation of students and intellectuals suffocating under the strictures of President Suharto’s New Order, found a way to get hold of and read them. Banning the books was, paradoxically, probably the best way to draw interest to them.

Lane certainly is right, that there can be no understanding of the past without an effort to come to terms with it analytically and politically. But one can also understand why Pramoedya advised younger people that “they should write their elders off as unable to make any new contributions.

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