House of Glass

Police commissioner Tuan Pangemanann, narrator of this concluding volume to Pramoedya's extraordinary tetralogy set in colonial Indonesia, is a Sorbonne-educated reactionary, a consummate hypocrite, a cultivated monster, a sadist with pangs of conscience. Recognizing the rottenness of the colonial administration, he greatly admires Minke, crusading newspaper editor and nationalist fighter against Dutch imperialism, considering him a man of principle. Yet, as an obedient tool of the Netherlands Indies' ruling elite in the period from 1912 through the end of WWI, Pangemanann feels duty-bound to crush Minke and the native movement he represents, whether by arrest, torture or counterinsurgency terrorism. The first three volumes of Pramoedya's quartet (This Earth of Mankind; Child of All Nations; Footsteps)--written during the author's 14-year banishment, 1965-1979, to the prison island of Buru--were narrated by Minke, a progressive witness of world events. Here, by filtering the anti-colonialist struggle through Pangemanann's ambivalent, warped perspective, Pramoedya spikes his epic saga with slyly modernist irony, creating a work that is as subversive today as when it was written. (May) FYI: Pramoedya is currently under city arrest in Jakarta: all his books remain banned in Indonesia. Penguin will reissue the first three volumes of the Buru quartet in paperback to coincide with the publication of House of Glass.