Brian Russell Roberts is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University and the author of
Keith Foulcher is Honorary Associate in the Department of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney and the coeditor of
Brian Russell Roberts is Associate Professor of English at Brigham Young University and the author of
Keith Foulcher is Honorary Associate in the Department of Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney and the coeditor of
De Preangerbode’s Review of The Outsider (1954)
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Published:March 2016
A year after its original publication in English, Wright’s 1953 novel The Outsider was available in Indonesia in its Dutch translation, as this review in a Bandung Dutch-language newspaper indicates. Although Wright’s Indonesian interlocutors were committed nationalists and prominent producers and consumers of the vibrant new Indonesian-language media culture in the mid-1950s, they also read widely in Dutch and other European languages, and it is likely that some of them may have encountered The Outsider in its Dutch translation before Wright’s 1955 visit. The review describes Wright’s novel as “chilling.” Identifying Wright as a “reformed Communist,” it asserts that he browbeats his readers with disquisitions on the big questions confronting “modern man.”
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