Product Description

From one of the world's most acclaimed writers comes a collection of beautiful short stories based on the author's childhood ramoedya Ananta Toer is a major figure in world literature, listed in John Major's rewrite of the famous Lifetime Reading Plan among the likes of James Baldwin, Bertolt Brecht, Graham Greene, and John Steinbeck as one of 100 authors everyone should read. A constant contender for the Nobel Prize, he recently won one of France's highest literary awards and has won the highest award in Asian letters. In All That Is Gone, Pramoedya's semiautobiographical stories deal with life's major themes: birth and death, sexual knowledge and love, compassion and revenge. Some stories are written from a child's point of view, others from that of an adult. But all are written in a style that quickly wraps the reader up in this master storyteller's narrative web. This is the first time Pramoedya's short fiction has been widely available to the English reading public; its publication represents a significant addition to the canon of world literature in translation.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1708932 in Books
• Published on: 2005-01-25
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .49" h x 5.72" w x 7.58" l, .41 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In these early stories, many appearing in English for the first time, one of Indonesia's leading writers illuminates with a quiet ferocity some of the most turbulent years in his nation's history. Often told through a child's observant eyes, the eight stories—which draw on the author's own upbringing in East Java during Dutch colonial rule, Japanese invasion and bloody periods of independence and civil war—are written in a warm, lyrical style that gives way to sudden pools of sadness. In the title story, the narrator evokes a dreamlike childhood along the banks of the Lusi River, but also tells matter-of-factly of a beloved servant who contracts syphilis and is abruptly dismissed for stealing. "Revenge" tells of the "bullet fever" of the independence years, as undertrained, undersupplied young nationalists are set loose on enemies near and far. "Independence Day" is also a cautionary war tale, featuring a young man maimed and blinded in combat and pitied by his family. In "Acceptance," a novella-length work, sisters and brothers take up arms for opposing political movements while their once-prosperous home disintegrates. Pramoedya, as he is called, is best known for his Buru Quartet, a cycle of novels set in the dying days of Dutch rule, and recent books such as The Girl from the Coast. These stories, though smaller in scope, show the nascent political consciousness that flowered in later novels and led to the author's long-time imprisonment under the Suharto regime. Samuels ably translates Pramoedya's informal storytelling, and his introductory note gives a useful overview of the author's long career.
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* Translator Samuels says that, while in the West the novel is the dominant literary form, in Indonesia, shorter stories and poems are still preferred because they are closer to the orally told story. Toer, many of whose novels have appeared in English, launched his career with stories, and this volume indicates more truly why his compatriots love him. These narratives of family life in Toer's birthplace, the little Javanese city of Brora, possess the accessible diction, clear vision, and friendly fellowship expected of and carefully cultivated by oral storytellers. Toer is so good in this manner that, while we read him, we become townspeople of Brora and achieve considerable understanding of what life in a twentieth-century "developing" country was like. This collection isn't a random presentation but traces from early childhood to marriage the life of a man who is narrator of the first five stories and the last one. The other two are about contemporaries of the narrator--one a blind, legless ex-soldier; the other an 11-year-old thrust into the care of her younger siblings when the Japanese occupy Indonesia. The poetry of the first story is complemented by the humor of the last, the dire but not fatal situation in the second (an 8-year-old girl's marriage) by the horrors that, in the penultimate one, attend little Sri's stewardship of her family during years of war. Toer is a great storyteller. Ray Olson
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