SOURCE: Coppola, Carlo. Review of House of Glass, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. World Literature Today 71, no. 3 (summer 1997): 652-53.

In the following review, Coppola commends House of Glass as an effective conclusion to the author's Buru series and notes that the Indonesian government's ban on Pramoedya's literary works only reinforces the dominant themes of his novels.

Some facts concerning Pramoedya Ananta Toer's magnum opus, the Buru Quartet, are well known: he “wrote” it while a political prisoner of the Indonesian government on notorious Buru Island from 1965 to 1979; refused writing materials, Pramoedya composed the novels orally and spoke them to fellow prisoners, who memorized them for him; only late in his prison term was he given pen and paper; more recently, he has been under city arrest in Jakarta for years; and his English translator, the Australian diplomat Max Lane, was expelled from Indonesia for having made the translation.

House...