SOURCE: Coppola, Carlo. Review of Footsteps, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer. World Literature Today 70, no. 1 (winter 1996): 239-40.

In the following review, Coppola praises Footsteps as a worthy continuation of Pramoedya's Buru series but comments that the author's emphasis on “broad humanistic ideals” may be unattractive to some readers.

Pramoedya Ananta Toer's “Buru tetralogy,” based on the life of the preeminent Indonesian nationalist and pioneering journalist Tirto Adi Suryo, was written on Buru Island, where the novelist was imprisoned without trial for fourteen years for his communist sympathies and alleged implication in the cataclysmic 1 October 1965 coup. This fictionalized account, starting in 1898, traces in bildungsroman fashion the story of Minke, the protagonist-narrator, a “Native” who, in the first novel of the series, This Earth of Mankind (1992), leaves his village to go to the port town of Surabaya, where, as one of only two “Natives” in the prestigious Dutch-language grammar school, he...