This book is a bit of a treasure, lent to me by an Indonesian friend, and probably not easy to source from bricks-and-mortar bookshops. Published in the hardback first edition, it was (after a book of poetry) the second title produced by the Lontar Foundation, set up in 1987 with these aims, as expressed on the Title page:
Yayasan Lontar, the Lontar Foundation, is a non profit organisation whose aims are fostering a greater appreciation of Indonesian literature and culture, supporting the work of authors and translators of Indonesian literature, and improving the quality of publication and distribution of Indonesian literary works and translations.
Lontar was founded by the American John McGlynn, along with four Indonesian writers, Goenawan Mohamad, Sapardi Djoko Damono, Umar Kayam, and Subagio Sastrowardoyo, and it is safe to say that since those early days McGlynn has been a major contributor to Indonesian works available in translation.
Shackles is ostensibly a rather melodramatic love triangle. This is the blurb from the Lontar website:
Shackles is the story of a love triangle. Dr Sukartono and his independent-minded wife, Tini, are facing marital problems when the singer Rohayah enters into the mix. Unlike Tini, Rohayah is ready to provide Sukartono with the devotion he lacks at home. This story illustrates the confusion experienced by many Indonesians of the pre-independence generation as they struggled to overcome problems stemming from their tradition-bound society.
However, (unless you are keen on melodramatic romance) to make satisfying reading out of Shackles, it is essential to contextualise the story. Firstly, it is set in the 1930s (when middle-class educated Indonesians had telephones and cars) but Indonesia was still a Dutch colony, Jakarta was still called Batavia, and the Independence Movement was still being firmly repressed. (Sukarno, who became President of independent Indonesia in 1949 i.e. a decade after this book was written, gets arrested and imprisoned twice during the story). But as you might know from a reading of This Earth of Mankind (The Buru Quartet #1), by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, (translated by Max Lane) activists in the independence movement were frustrated by the ineffectual urban Indonesian elites, and all three of the characters in the love triangle can be seen to be more obsessed with their personal relationships than with casting off the colonial yoke.
Feminists will probably bristle at Dr Tono’s assessment of his wife Tini’s discontent, but read it instead as an allegory of how a Dutch colonist might be puzzled by demands for independence when, from his PoV, there is nothing to complain about because subservience is the natural way of things, just as male dominance is:
What was it she had said before? What was it? Yes, that women today are asking for equal rights with men. But what is it they want to be equal? It is a woman’s right to care for her husband’s children and the house in which they live. Today, however, it seems that the only thing a woman is good for is making demands. Maybe she will meet her husband at the door when he comes from work, but does she ask him to sit down? Does she take off his shoes for him? Women of today don’t seem to know that to kneel before one’s husband, to take his shoes off for him, is a woman’s way of showing her devotion and loyalty. But what do women do now? And what is a woman’s right, if not taking care of the man she loves? (p.2)
But this and other passages dismissive of women are also intended to show the characters’ difficulty in adapting to inevitable change. Dr Tono wants to pick and choose which elements of adat (customs and tradition) to retain as the country transitions into modernity. He wants the respect and status of an educated, middle-class Indonesian, but he doesn’t recognise that his wife Tini is a dynamic and entrepreneurial woman with an amazing capacity for organising major events. She, attracted by the freedoms of emancipation but not recognising its incompatibility with either the society she lives in or the respectability she thinks she deserves, doesn’t see why she should wait on him. Yet at the same time, she resents the demands of his work and the emptiness of their marriage. They both still want to be loved, but they want respect and status as individuals as well, in a society where status is rigidly codified and based on community—not individualism.
Into this fraught relationship comes an old school friend of Dr Tono’s: the predictably beautiful, enigmatic and irresistible Yah, happy to serve Dr Tono’s needs but not respectable enough for divorce and remarriage to be an option. While Tini represents the slavish adoption of Western mores about emancipation, Yah represents the emancipation that’s needed. She was forced into an arranged marriage and having fled it, finds herself unable to support herself in a respectable way. She has to hide from Dr Tono that she is a singer of kroncong – defined in the glossary at the back of the book as popular Indonesian music, distinctive for its blend of Western orchestration and indigenous rhythms once considered lewd and ‘low class’.
There isn’t anything at Wikipedia about the association of kroncong with a disreputable status, excerpt to say that it was brought to Indonesia by Portuguese sailors in the 16th century and that it was enjoyed by lower-class citizens and gangs. You can hear a contemporary example of it here (female) and here (male), and a raunchier (by Indonesian standards) example here. When you listen to the elegance and complexity of the traditional gamelan you can see that the reaction to kroncong was not unlike the disapproval of jazz, pop or rock and roll by classical music lovers in the West. (I used to play in a gamelan group: my instrument was one of the little ones at the front of the group in this video. I had little notation cards hidden on the floor beside me… though I could play an entire Beethoven piano sonata off by heart, there was no way I could remember long pieces like these players do!)
The representation of the crass kroncong compared to the grace and beauty of the gamelan is another example of imported cultures displacing tradition, but there is also a scene where Tini plays a Beethoven sonata to an audience that would rather listen to the popular kroncong, emphasising that middle-class intellectuals were out of touch with ordinary people.
Shackles (Belenggu) is said (in the Introduction by William H Frederick and at Wikipedia) to be the first modern Indonesian psychological novel. It is a departure from traditional themes, and focusses instead on the psychology of the conflict between the characters. It wasn’t well-received at first because of its ‘immoral’ depiction of prostitution and adultery, and others disliked its fatalistic ending. Readers today may find the internal musings and sometimes stilted dialogue tiresome and occasionally repetitive. Nevertheless, it’s an important milestone in the development of the modern Indonesian novel. Belenggu has been translated into multiple languages and in 1969 was awarded the inaugural Indonesian Literary Prize, along with Marah Rusli’s Sitti Nurbaya (1922), and Achdiat Karta Mihardja’s Atheis (Atheist) (1949) (both of which are scheduled for reading with my Indonesian bookgroup in 2019) and also Abdul Muis’s Salah Asuhan (Never the Twain) (1928), on my TBR.
Author: Armijn Pane
Title: Shackles (Belenggu)
Translated by John H. McGlynn
Publisher: Lontar Foundation, 1988, first published 1940
ISBN: 9798083106 (hbk)
Source: loan from a friend, thanks Lendriani!
Available from the Lontar website (pbk, ISBN 9789798083815) and from Amazon US (print or kindle), and Amazon Australia (kindle only)
Lindsay Tanner is the former finance minister in the Rudd Government during the Global Financial Crisis. He and his colleagues were the ones who devised the strategies for staving off the GFC in Australia, so I have a soft spot for his writing. Not enough, alas, to like Comfort Zone much…
1) What’s the longest book I read this year and the book that took me the longest to finish?
The 
4) What’s my favourite re-read of 2018?
5) What book did I read for the first time in 2018 that I look forward to re-reading in the future?
6) What’s my favourite short story or novella that I read in 2018?
7) Mass appeal: which book would I recommend to a wide variety of readers?
8) Specialised appeal: which book did I like but would be hesitant to recommend to just anyone?
Under the Visible Life was published in 2016, the same year that identity politics went mainstream in Australia. Authors on opposite sides of the cultural appropriation argument got airspace in the mainstream media and there was much sturm und drang. But if the same thing was happening in Toronto where Canadian author Kim Echlin lives, then this book was a challenge to the debate. Who gets to write the stories of people with mixed heritage? The two central characters in Under the Visible Life are Afghan-American; and Chinese-Canadian. The Afghan-American girl marries a Pakistani; and the Chinese-Canadian marries an African-American. I see at the back of the book that there are thanks to consultants on these cultures and perhaps this is the respectful way an author can write such a story. I leave it to others to judge: I am firmly on the fence with this issue…
The last book I re-read
Middle England, by Jonathan Coe, which I bought on Monday. I actually bought three on the same day, (from The Avenue Bookshop in Elsternwick) but Middle England was the last one I found there. It appealed because Brexit had been so much in the news this week, and maybe this book will explain Britain’s mystifying politics…
5. The last book I wrote in the margins of
The last book I lost
I couldn’t remember how I came to have misplaced Anita Heiss’s Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, but I bought a replacement copy (and a couple of copies for giveaways) at the Word for Word Non Fiction festival in Geelong. And then a week later the friend I’d lent it to, returned it! My fault entirely: I should keep a record of books I lend.
The last book I argued over
The last book you couldn’t find
Most of the time, I vaguely despise the concept of ‘rewriting’ a famous book. Ok, Margaret Atwood famously did it with The Penelopiad, but she was a well-established author making a feminist point, and obviously not compensating for an inability to think of her own story. I want to read books that give me new ideas to think about, not recycled versions of other ideas even if they are beautifully written.
The Inheritors is an astonishing novel. I picked it up from the library shelves on the strength of William Golding’s name because Lord of the Flies is unforgettable and 
In the 80s, my favourite authors were Mary Wesley and Fay Weldon. Mary Wesley began writing in her seventies, and she died in 1997 so there are only ten novels listed 
Fay Weldon (born in 1931) started writing in 1967 and is still going strong, with 42 books to her credit 
JANUARY
FEBRUARY
MARCH
APRIL
MAY
JUNE
JULY
AUGUST
SEPTEMBER
OCTOBER
NOVEMBER
DECEMBER
I stumbled on Sculptures of Melbourne at the library—and what a treasure it is!
Exhausted by our travels and the rigorous investigation of the bookshop in case there were more books we needed (and there were*), we then repaired to a very fine Southbank restaurant called 
*chuckle* I think that ‘Deep Trouble’ might have been a better title for this book than Deep Night!
Now that I’ve published my Best-of lists for 2018, I wasn’t going to read any more Australian books because I have a swag of library books by overseas authors to get through. I was going to browse through this one in the new years and (maybe) try some of the recipes but it’s due back tomorrow and I can’t renew it. Needs must.
Melmoth was an impulse choice, on display at the library and I’d seen it online somewhere amongst the blogs I read. Sarah Perry is the author of The Essex Serpent which won multiple awards, and I had hovered over that one at the library too, ultimately deciding that I probably wouldn’t like it.
As in previous years, these are the books I really liked and admired during 2018. They are books that I read this year, not necessarily published this year. The contenders are ANZ authors only. If you read this blog regularly you know that I also read international authors and translations too, but for this list, well, there are plenty of other sources singing the praises of books published elsewhere. All links go to my reviews.
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Just as well I don’t do my Best Books of the Year until it’s almost the end of the year…If it’s not too late, put this one on your list for Santa. Or beg for a book voucher to buy it…
Flames by Robbie Arnott (Text Publishing),
The Fireflies of Autumn: And Other Tales of San Ginese by Moreno Giovannoni (Black Inc. Books) 
Miss Ex-Yugoslavia by Sofija Stefanovic (Penguin Random House Australia) 
Common People by Tony Birch (University of Queensland Press) 
Taboo by Kim Scott (Picador Australia) 
By coincidence, I’d just read Paul Daley’s latest piece in The Guardian: it’s called ‘
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