Novel · A way to begin
This Earth of Mankind
Bumi manusia
Pramoedya Ananta Toer · 1980
Synopsis
Surabaya, in the Dutch East Indies. Minke, a young Javanese of minor nobility, a brilliant pupil at a Dutch school almost reserved for Europeans, already publishes articles in the Dutch newspapers. A schoolmate, Robert Suurhof, takes him to the home of a Dutchman, Herman Mellema, and his native concubine, Nyai Ontosoroh, who runs the household and the business while her master sinks. Minke falls in love with their daughter, Annelies, and learns from this woman without schooling, educated by books and by life, what colonial law does to the natives.
Context
Forbidden to write at the Buru penal camp, the author first told the novel aloud to his fellow prisoners from 1973, then wrote it down in 1975. It appeared on 25 August 1980 from Hasta Mitra, a publishing house founded by former political prisoners, and a third printing came out as early as November. The attorney general banned it on 29 May 1981, in the name of a communist propaganda of which the book says nothing; fewer than a thousand copies were seized out of nearly twenty thousand. It opens a tetralogy whose hero is inspired by the journalist Tirto Adhi Soerjo.
Who it is for
First volume of a tetralogy, translated into French and English; the story is told in the first person by the young hero.
Prizes and reception
Translated into thirty-three languages before its legal republication in Indonesia in 2005, it was adapted for the screen by Hanung Bramantyo in 2019.