Works of fiction/history?
 

Its been a long while since I was here; its very good to see some familiar names and that the interest is still strong in the keris.
I was wondering if anyone knows of works of fiction or historical fiction that deal with precolonial life, or early colonial life, in those parts of the world where the keris is found. It seems that in post colonial Africa, Southeast Asia, and most particularly Japan there is a whole body of this kind of literature. Do any similar works exist in Indonesia?

Joseph Conrad
 

The Outcast Of The Islands

Karain A Memory
https://archive.org/details/KarainAMemory

Victory

The End Of the Tether

Falk

Typhoon

The Rescue

Most can be read free these days with Google's help.

Perhaps the best known and most influential novel of the colonial period in Jawa is "Max Havelaar" by Multatuli

Multatuli was the pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker.

Here is a link that tells of the author, it is worth reading:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multatuli

Excellent, thank you so much for those recommendations. I will most definitely look into those.

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim

Has anyone written a book about precolonial times? Something like Musashi by Eiji Yoshikawa but with the islands of Indonesia as a back drop? Perhaps the national character, if there is such a thing in a country that diverse, precludes it.

I recently bought a copy of a biography (non-fiction) of Sir Stamford Raffles which has a fair bit of information on local culture etc. Some of the Malaysian and Indonesian artefacts he collected are in the British Museum. The book is "Raffles and the Golden Opportunity" by Victoria Glendinning 2012.

That one sounds interesting, Colin.
You can get Raffles' History of Java free as a kindle download, but it is unreadable unfortunately. :(

Unreadable as in formatted badly or unreadable as in soporific to the modern reader?

If you enjoy historical fiction, George MacDonald Fraser fills the bill. His Flashman series of novels includes one, Flashman's Lady, which features our antihero, who chases pirates in 1841 in the company of James Brooke, later Rajah of Sarawak.

The whole series is a pleasant, amusing, raffish and informative read. Link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Flashman

I've read them all, they are really hilarious. Flash is just the worst.

Unreadable as in garbled, missing words, paragraphs etc.
Not to mention in physical book size; our member Naga Sasra had an old copy that was two very thick volumes.

Look for "History of Java" at archive.org, they offer a number of copies from different editons, free to read and download.
Special the first edition of 1817 is of very good quality with beautiful drawings.

I have an Oxford in Asia reprint, two vols., cased, 1978

It does contain a lot of statistics on commerce, production, trade, but it also contains a lot of very interesting information. Even though it was written in the first quarter of the 19th century, it is easy, maybe very easy to read. The style is not at all academic, and print size is such that if you speed read it is very easy to scan. I have seen this reprint come up for sale from time to time, it is expensive, but not prohibitive.