SOURCE: Crace, Jim. “Under the Slipper.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4265 (28 December 1984): 1506.

In the following review, Crace notes that, despite its “occasionally bloated narrative style,” Child of All Nations is a charming and ambitious novel.

It is easy to understand why Child of All Nations, the second of the four-part historical tapestry which Pramoedya Ananta Toer composed and memorized during his fourteen-year imprisonment on Buru Island, so swiftly became a best-seller in Indonesia, despite its uneven, episodic structure and its occasionally bloated narrative style. Its oral origins among the intellectual élite of a concentration camp in 1973 and its subsequent “recall” for publication in 1979, after Pramoedya's release, were a much celebrated subversion of authority. Here was an ambitious, argumentative work of imagination produced in circumstances specifically designed to isolate writers and to suppress creativity, to break the spirit of the story-teller.

For the same reason the novel, together with the...