Book Review: As the Day Draws to an End (Jacob Vredenbregt)
On December 18, 2020, I got this book from my English teacher. The first time I saw it, I thought, “Wow, there are no yellow spots on it. The color is brownish, but it’s in a very good condition after all.” Apparently, the old books have a different kind of paper than the nowadays books. They have better quality that it’s worth buying.
The English version of this book is a translated version from the Dutch version, titled “Aan het einde van de middag.” The translator is an Indonesian. Her name is Maria Sudarmadji.
This book mainly talks from the author’s point of view, Jacob Vredenbregt, a Dutch who lived in Indonesia after Indonesia’s independence in 1945. The title of the book represents how the book was made. The author wrote about his daily experience in Indonesia when the day had nearly become yesterday.
He was in charge of taking care of the post-colonial plantation. There are many demonstrations from the planters because they didn’t receive enough salary. Partai Komunis Indonesia or The Communist Party of Indonesia was helping the planters to do this. They were called “people from town” who ate pork and didn’t pray. There were several corruption practices indeed, done by the boss, camat, and also the head-mandur.
The boss there was called “toan besar” which represents “tuan besar” if we correct the spelling according to Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (KBBI) V. I found this book fun because it left so many Indonesian and Madurese phrases untranslated. Like the previous toan besar, camat, the head mandur, besaran, panu, badik, banci yang genit, and many more. When I reached the end of the book, I just found that there was a list of those phrases meaning in English.
Even if there were corruption practices, the author was not in that circle. He was considered close to the locals, such as Samsuddin the head-mandur, Mohammad the besaran helper, and Sit the cook. He even tried to have “kerok” which means rubbing a coin’s edge repeatedly to the back of a sick person until it was red and sore.
This book does not have any specific plot. I also didn’t get the specific reason why the book has three parts. Maybe they were to mark some time periods. Instead, it has plenty of Indonesian cultural representation during the time. The author also talked about how Madurese aduan sapi (bullfighting) happened, how the Dutch society talked about the weird head administrator, how the people on the mountain used guna-guna (magic spells) which made outsiders disinclined… I felt like I was traveling through time while reading the book.
At the end of the book, the author left Indonesia because of the Dutch expulsion. All of the Dutch houses were claimed as the property of Republik Indonesia that there was no place anymore for them. The author didn’t state when exactly this happened, but maybe it was around 1949 after Konferensi Meja Bundar.
Because of the thoughtful leadership by the author, some of the locals missed him and asked him to open a prophecy book to see if he would come back to Indonesia someday. The prophecy said yes. In the epilogue, the author really came back and saw things had become more developed in a good way than in the past.
