This Earth of Mankind [Paperback]

Minke is a young Javanese student of great intelligence and ambition. Living equally among the colonists and colonized of 19th-century Java, he battles against the confines of colonial strictures. It is his love for Annelies that enables him to find the strength to embrace his world.Pramoedya Ananta Toer, born on the island of Java in 1925, was imprisoned first by the Dutch, then by the Indonesian government as a political prisoner. He received the PEN Freedom to Write Award and the Ramon Magsaysay Award.

INTRODUCTION

Set at the turn of the century in the waning days of Dutch colonial rule,This Earth of Mankindis the first of the four books that comprise Pramoedya Ananta Toer's Buru Quartet. A powerful story of oppression, injustice, and one young man's political, emotional, and intellectual awakening. Pramoedya Ananta Toer wroteThis Earth of Mankindwhile confined on the prison island of Buru, where prisoners did hard labor, clearing jungle with the crudest tools, and suffered starvation diets, beatings, and torture. Much of Pramoedya's work has in fact been written under such circumstances. I happen to be pretty productive when I am in jail, he has said. When you are in jail, you have to spend more time with yourself.

The narrator ofThis Earth of Mankindis Minke, the first native Javanese boy to attend an elite Dutch colonial high school. A brilliant student, descendant of Javanese royalty, and an acutely sensitive observer of the complex and dangerous world around him, Minke's life is disrupted when he is invited to live with a highly unconventional family. Here Minke meets an extraordinary cast of characters who will force him to confront the entrenched antagonisms of a society built upon racial and gender oppression. The household is headed by Nyai Ontosoroh, a native concubine who runs the family's dairy business, and her half-European children, the beautiful Annalies and the treacherous Robert. Minke falls in love l3c