The Buru Quartet can be described as Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s way of answering the question: what is Indonesia becoming? At the end of the 1950s, when the Indonesia question was heating up, he began to think of a series of novels that would seek and trace the steps of Indonesian nationalism.

Pramoedya’s answer was to return to the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. This was the time when the seeds of Indonesian nationalism