HOUSE OF GLASS

House of Glass

House of Glass

About the author

One of Indonesia's most prominent authors, Toer spent most of his adult life in prison; his works have frequently been banned by the government. Toer's first novel, The Fugitive (1950), was written during his internment by the Dutch. Toer became a leading figure in the Marxist literary group Lekra and was again incarcerated after the 1965 overthrow of Sukarno, joining thousands of other left-wing artists on the prison island of Buru 9Gwilt, 1996).

The author of over 30 works of fiction and nonfiction, Toer is best known for his Buru tetralogy, which traces the birth of nationalism in Indonesia. Most of the work was composed as narration to fellow prisoners, then later recorded and published after Toer's release in 1979. Although the events of the tetralogy take place in the past, they must be understood in the context of his experiences at Buru. In 1988 Toer received the PEN Freedom-to-Write Award.

Description

House of Glass is the final installment of this tetralogy. The first three - This Earth of Mankind, Child of All Nations, and Footsteps are an extended autobiography of Madan Ras Minke, who is modeled on the early-twentieth-century Indonesian patriot-journalist Tirto Adi Suryo 9Gwilt, 1996).

Whereas the first three novels are narrated by Minke, House of Glass shifts away from him and is presented as a set of office notes made by Jacques Pangemanann, the first high-ranking Native officer in the Dutch Indies colonial service. An orphan, he was adopted by a French couple who took him to France, reared him there, and educated him at the Sorbonne. Married to a Frenchwoman, he is the major senior expert on Native nationalist activities.

Through the course of the novel the idealistic, principled Pangemanann degenerates into a corrupt, morally compromised, womanizing, drunken political hack who follows his superiors' orders to track and, when necessary, to undermine the nascent nationalist organizations in the colonies. The new personality is, while still learning, and matured. And there is a new character introduced with a new plot.

This new character is Organisation, with a capital. This character is new not only because it did not appear in the first two novels, but because, before the organisations that appear in Footsteps and House of Glass appeared in Indonesia, there were no such organisations. What grips and thrills in Pramoedyas story-telling is his ability to capture these processes of conception, gestation and birth. We read not only about scores of fascinating, vividly drawn characters and their lives and adventures, but about how a whole new society starts to be born(Lane, 1992).

This is the last book from the Buru Quartet. This book is absolutely different from the three previous books. It tells the story from the perspective of the officer who trapped, jailed, and at the end "killed" Minke, the main character from the three previous books. From the captain's perspective we can see the incidents happened in and around Minke's life but from outside as the captain's job actually was ...