Notwithstanding that setback, Toer created this novel from memory, telling the story of a man honoured in 2006 as a National Hero of Indonesia. Toer had spent years researching the life of Tirto Adi Suryo, who was the inspiration for this quartet, but Toer’s papers were all destroyed when he was arrested and held without trial for fourteen years. Footsteps is a more ‘political’ novel, and belongs in that distinctive category of historical fiction as activism, that is, it’s written by authors redressing the hidden stories and silences of colonised peoples in well-researched fiction. ( See my review of Book 2 for the background to this, and also for my thoughts about the translation and introduction which apply equally to this volume). Footsteps (Jejak Langkah) is the third in the Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet, the series of four novels tracing Indonesia’s ‘awakening’ that Toer wrote while in prison on the island of Buru.
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