Mapped
This Earth of Mankind
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Colonial Surabaya at the turn of the twentieth century, the largest port of the Dutch East Indies and a city ruled by a strict ladder of race and law. A gifted Javanese student at the elite Dutch H.B.S. is pulled south to Wonokromo, into the household of a formidable concubine who runs a European farm, and finally into the colonial courts. The map runs from the old town on the Kalimas down through Wonokromo to the sugar country of East Java.
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Twilight in Jakarta
Mochtar Lubis
Lubis's angry panorama of Jakarta in the mid-1950s cuts between the classes of the young republic's capital, from the garbage collectors of the kampungs to the corrupt politicians and businessmen growing rich on graft. The real city organises it: the crowded poor quarters around Senen, the leafy elite villas of Menteng, the smuggling docks of Tanjung Priok, the old commercial town of Kota, and the government centre at Merdeka Square where the rot begins.
5 places →