Picked up a good book to read , The Mute's Soliloquy, after my good friend, Rev. Anthony Loke blogged about Pramoedya's other work Arok of Java .
I had read Pramoedya's earlier work Keluarga Gerilya (published in 1950) back when I was in Form Six for my Malay literature paper . I enjoyed it though it was in Malay. The other was Sandera by Arena Wati.
The Mute's Soliloquy" is a loose autobiography woven together from letters and essays Pramoedya wrote secretly on Buru; he never expected them to survive, but a Catholic priest smuggled them out. The book is an extraordinary mixture of advice to his children, wrenching self-examination and testimony of his time on Buru, a place of shifting, petty rules, grinding labor and indifference to life. "I saw my friends killed by soldiers just for fun," Pramoedya told.
In 1965, Pramoedya Ananta Toer was detained by Indonesian authorities and eventually exiled to the penal island of Buru. Without a formal accusation or trial, the onetime national hero was imprisoned on Buru for eleven years. He survived under brutal conditions, somehow managing to produce his masterwork, the four novels of the Buru Quartet, as well as the remarkable journal entries, essays, and Letters that comprise this moving memoir
Reminiscent of the work of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Mute's Soliloquy is a harrowing portrait of a penal colony and a heartbreaking remembrance of life before it. With a resonance far beyond its particular time and place, it is Pramoedya's crowning achievement -- a passionate tribute to the freedom of the mind and a celebration of the human spirit.
