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A Sense of the Past |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / BOOKS FROM ABROAD |
| Author: Jack W. Meinhardt |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 3/1/1994 |
| Size: 2,092 Words, 12,579 Characters |
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PARA PRIYAYI
Sebuah Novel
Umar Kayam
Jakarta: Pustaka Utama Grafiti, 1993
308 pp.
"Wanagalih," the opening chapter of Umar Kayam's Para Priyayi, is the name of the town in East Java where much of the novel is set. This chapter, like the others, is told in the first person by one of the main characters--by Lantip, who was born in a village outside of Wanagalih but now lives in Jakarta. Unlike the other chapters, however, its title is a place-name, which is important in a work concerned with those layers of experience separating us from the past; for a place asks to be entered, to be delved into, and is something suited to revealing the sedimentation of life and events laid down by time.
The town of Wanagalih is the embodiment of a storied past, of the long memory of Japanese...
. . .
...and of what has been, or is being, lost. That is what we have in Para Priyayi. Lantip sees that the religious sense of life, bound up with a feeling for the past and the mystery of the universe, is in danger of becoming obsolete. The stories the Javanese have lived with for centuries, and the forms by which they have ordered their lives, are being transformed into "literature" and "culture."
(824 of 12,579 characters)
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