A Certain Age

“A Certain Age is a must for all who want to experience Indonesia’s colonial past through its intellectuals.” - Fridus Steijlen, Asian Studies Review

“By interweaving Indonesian memories with the insights of European avant-garde intellectuals such as Benjamin, Le Corbusier, and Proust [Mrazek] invites us to reflect us on the nature of modernity itself, to reconsider it from the perspective of a coloniality that he sees as often anticipating the metropole.” - Andrew J. Abalahir, Southeast Asian Studies

“In juxtaposing Indonesian and European voices from the 1930s to the 1990s, Rudolf Mrázek compels us to reconsider the unsettling because of contemporaneous origins and effects of modernity in the colony and metropole alike. In his highly textured and brilliantly edited interviews with aging urban revolutionaries, he shows how remembering the past entails recalling its traces archived and activated in voices animated by the noise of the street and the neighborhood, the music of salons and cinemas, the stuttering bursts of translations and trains, the routine hum of prison camp and classroom. They thus convey the force of a certain history that remains bound to yet irreducible to narration and analysis.” - Vicente Rafael, author of The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines

“In this original and very exciting work Rudolf Mrázek offers a stimulating way of thinking about historiography and a radical departure from the ways ‘we in the field’ are used to thinking and talking about the history of Indonesia. A rich text, resistant to generalizations, A Certain Age is evocative, moving, personal, disruptive, and subversive. It is a must-read.” - Henk Maier, author of We Are Playing Relatives: A Survey of Malay Writing

“Listen . . . as Mrazek certainly did, to the gentle, humorous and often wise and reflective voices of his Indonesian informants. Often recorded sitting on verandahs, against a background of street noise, their memories, but also their views at the end of their long lives, are worth hearing.” - Susan Blackburn, Inside Indonesia

“The book succeeds like no other before it in portraying the colony’s intellectual elites as contemporaneous with modern citizens of Europe and around the world. It is a generous book, involving the sharing of inspiring philosophical texts, literature, and memories, and lengthy quotations that do not simply illustrate analytical points, but animate social scenes.” - Matthew Isaac Cohen, Journal of Asian Studies

“This is but the latest in a series of strong writings by Mrázek on Indonesia; he is certainly accomplished in the field. . . . [A] carefully crafted work. . . .” - Howard Federspiel, Indonesia