The Opera Populaire

This post is gonna smack a lot of YH :)

It's embarrassing, but I just found out about Pak Pram's death after reading a Chinese newspaper. He passed away on Sun, 30 April 2006 in his house of residence, aged 81 and has been buried in Karet Bivak cemetery.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer was one of Indonesia's illustrous writers. His works concentrated mostly on fiction, with a few notable exceptions on the history of the Indonesian Chinese. He was seen as a threat by the Dutch as well as the Suharto regime later on and spent much time in imprisonment, where he also wrote his best works such as the Buru Quartet.

I 1st took interest in Pak Pram's writings when Dr. Aung-Thwin introduced us to his book, "This Earth of Mankind" in History in Fiction. As a person who spent some part of her life in Indonesia, I was spellbound by his mastery in story-telling and began to take more interest in the land I grew up in but could never really understand nor feel accepted in. So I began by devouring any book he authored and articles abt him, and later on moving on to other famous works written during the Dutch colonial period such as "Max Havelaar" by Multatuli, etc. He was even featured in Indonesia's 1st ever edition of Playboy, released in April 2006. (Due to a huge controvesy, the Playboy mag had been very toned down. It was so conservative that even other more established mags here like Cosmopolitan are more brazen lor. I checked it out myself ;))

The loss of Pak Pram is, in my view, a big loss to Indonesia's literary scene. On a more personal note, after researching so much about him, hearing about his death is to me, ironically, like losing a friend.