SOURCE: Noor, Ronny. Review of The Mute's Soliloquy, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. World Literature Today 74, no. 3 (summer 2000): 586-87.

In the following review, Noor lauds Pramoedya's “sagacious” personal reflections in The Mute's Soliloquy and argues that Indonesia should lift the ban on his works.

I first became familiar with Pramoedya Ananta Toer a few years back, in graduate school, when I read his masterpiece This Earth of Mankind (1991). It was an eloquent indictment of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia, a piercingly vivid portrayal of the power of the colonizer and the impotence of the colonized. Since then, I have read three more spectacular novels by him, all written in a penal colony. So I was eagerly waiting to learn about his life when The Mute's Soliloquy, his memoir, arrived for my review. It not only records the author's first fifty-four turbulent years, but also demonstrates the veracity of what Thomas...