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The Question of Red: A Novel

Book — Women in Translation


The Question of Red: A Novel

by Laksmi Pamuntjak

Format: Paperback, English
556 page(s)
ISBN/ISBN13: 9792299831/9789792299830
Published Mar 24, 2014 by Gramedia Pustaka Utama

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The Question of Red tells the story of two lovers, Amba and Bhisma, driven apart by one of the bloodiest Communist purges in the 20th century the massacres that took place in Indonesia between 1965 and 1968 in which some 1 million people were killed. From rural Java and Yogyakarta to the prison camps of Buru Island, where some 12,000 alleged Communists were incarcerated without trial during the Suharto administration, the lives of the central characters interpret the Mahabharata that timeless allegory of war within a family with a modern twist. Published in Indonesian last year as Amba: Sebuah Novel, Laksmi Pamuntjak’s novel has enjoyed three reprinting within four months.1


  1. Laksmi Pamuntjak 


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The book is certainly about the question of red, the life and loves of young people and the death of their dreams of an ideal society.
Anjana Basu  in Love and loss in vanished times (Statesman, Sep 10, 2017)
Pamuntjak′s link between the many socio-political layers that make up the island nation, its bloody recent history, and the fate of her protagonists, is convincing on a literary level.
Bettina David  in Laksmi Pamuntjak’s novel “The Question of Red”: The silence is broken (Qantara, Oct 14, 2015)
The Question of Red is at its best in presenting the days prior to the Indonesian holocaust of 1966, and in its sense of the personal tragedies it brought to so many, when the country’s dream of freedom and independence lost all colour and was reduced to ashes.
— in Jennifer Mackenzie reviews The Question of Red by Laksmi Pamuntjak (Mascara Literary Review, May 17, 2014)


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