Mind you, I have lots of project ideas. But they all require time, to plan and to execute. I want something I can do between dinner and bedtime, something I can do at work for a few minutes while things are slow. Researching trip destinations is usually a fun one, and we are heading to Melbourne in October. But I don't want to kill Melbourne yet.
So my idea is to do a 30 consecutive days of blog entry on books - books I've read, books I want, book sales, my experience with book, etc. We'll see if I actually keep it up for 30 days (since I have a nasty habit of not finishing what I started), but that's part of the reason I want to do this.
Hence, my first entry: "Tales from Djakarta" by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (PAT). I am currently re-reading this collection of short stories, set in Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia, in the 1950s.
Pramoedya is likely Indonesia's most well-known writer, partly (I think) due to his long and unjustified detention & exile at Buru Island, where he conceived his most famous opus: the 4 novels of the Buru Quartet. Originally narrated orally to his fellow prisoners because he was forbidden to write and did not have access to writing supplies, the novels only saw the light of day only after Pram's fellow prisoners began surreptitiously procuring papers for him, and later they smuggled his written works out. This true story of creation and perseverance in the face of total oppression lent Pram a kind of a mythical hero persona, something which drew many people, myself included.
Many of PAT's works are not uplifting. The stories in this collection, subtitled "Caricatures of Circumstances and Their Human Beings," are a bouquet of heartbreaks, dire circumstances, slow death and poverty. The stories were written at a time when Indonesia was experiencing a painful shift from the fiery hopes and idealism of the revolution for independence. People like PAT, who were fervent supporters of the Republic, were frustrated and disappointed with the corruption and backbiting that quickly took hold among the new Indonesian governing bodies and political landscape. After fiercely fighting to throw off the yoke of occupation to reclaim the country for their own people, they proved to be no better at governing and no less corrupt than their oppressors. The people in these stories are no better off under the rule of their fellow Indonesian than they were under the Dutch or the Japanese. Ignorance, illiteracy and poverty plague were their lot as they had been the lot of many other before them, and will likely continue to be the lot of plenty other in the future.
For more on Pramoedya Ananta Toer, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pramoedya_Ananta_Toer
Here's an interesting thesis paper by Stephen Miller on PAT's role in Indonesian Politics:
http://www.une.edu.au/lcl/asianlang/indonesian/pdf/pram_pol.pdf
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