[.ca] All That is Gone (ISBN 1401366635)

A Fine Collection of Stories, A Fine Author:
Pramoedya Ananta Toer is an Indonesian writer who lives in Jakarta and has garnered many prizes for his work. I was surprised to read that he is considered by some to be in a class with James Baldwin, Graham Greene, Bertolt Brecht, and John Steinbeck. Perhaps in his thirty novels he may rise to those standards, but as for ALL THAT IS GONE: Stories (my first introduction to his writing) he emerges as a talented story teller, but one of many such writers active today. Not that this collection is not noteworthy - far from that. Toer has a style that is deceptively simple (he likens stories to the tradition in his native Indonesia of depending on the spoken tales by storytellers instead of the written word) and while the content of his stories may seem simplistic, the after-burn of the message is unusually pungent. The stories appear autobiographical in nature and range from tales as seen and told through a child's eyes to those of young adult and mature elders. In the title story the narrator is a small boy who is observing his family disintegration. In "Inem" one of his 'foster children family' who share the narrator's home is sold into marriage at age 8 and the story concerns her fantasies of 'being someone' and her ultimate acceptance of reality. "Circumcision" is gently humorous and simultaneously tender as our narrator gains the courage for the tradition of circumcision making him an adult. "Revenge" (the strongest of this collection) is a story about the young man's need to participate in the glory of becoming a soldier in order to become a man and to honor his homeland, only to come face to face with the realities of War in all its horror. "Defeated troops are always silent, but that night I thought I could hear the men's hearts screaming out to be remembered." "...there came to me my life's first revelation: that life is actually very simple, but that man, lake a wind in the dry season filling the air with debris, turns simplicity into chaos. It is this self-induced state of chaos that causes men to kill one another." "War is war, no doubt about it - a constant cycle of man's evil toward man." The other stories deal with how prisoners are ill-treated (!) and how Indonesia has moved through the maze of colonialism and independence with lasting imprints from the line of captors - the Dutch, the Japanese, the revolutionaries. Toer's manner is straightforward and incorporates a lot of Indonesian history and culture. For some this will be revelatory, for others it will be a confusing stumbling block. In all, these are well-written stories (and in the case of "Revenge" , brilliant). No doubt Toer is an important writer, but I think it will take more than this collection to justify the eager praise on the book jacket cover.