It was the first of many brutal acts against the novelist, historian and tireless critic of Indonesia's rulers. He was to spend the next 14 years in jail or on the penal colony on Buru Island, a grim camp for political prisoners under the New Order regime of President Suharto. After his release, his books were banned, and he remained restricted to the city of Jakarta until Suharto fell in May 1998. This spring, for the first time in 40 years, the 74-year-old writer left Indonesia to promote his new book, "The Mute's Soliloquy" (Hyperion).

"The Mute's Soliloquy" is a loose autobiography woven together from letters and essays Pramoedya wrote secretly on Buru; he never expected them to survive, but a Catholic priest smuggled them out. The book is an extraordinary mixture of advice to his children, wrenching self-examination and testimony of his time on Buru, a place of shifting, petty rules, grinding labor and indifference to life. "I saw my friends killed by soldiers just for fun," Pramoedya told me in Jakarta earlier this year.

Once he was allowed to write, however, "It was like a flood being released." He turned out a steady stream of books and plays, including his masterwork, "The Buru Quartet," which began as a tale narrated in daily installments to his fellow prisoners. The four books it comprises are extraordinary meditations on culture, colonialism and national identity, but they are also pungent, melodramatic novels filled with turmoil and romance. Their challenge to Suharto lay in their withering examination of both the Javanese feudalism and the colonial structures of surveillance and control that had provided models for his rule. Published after Pramoedya's release from Buru in 1979, they were banned as Marxist, their editor jailed and the Australian diplomat who translated them into English thrown out of the country.

On Monday, Indonesia holds its first real elections since 1955, with 48 parties fighting for seats in a parliament that will choose the next president. While the press is once again free and political activity is legal, the nation has been struck by ethnic and religious violence that has left hundreds dead. Mobs have burned mosques and churches, and ethnic Chinese, the main victims of the May riots, continue to flee the country. East Timor will be allowed to vote on independence, but already a civil war is brewing there, stirred up with arms and encouragement from the Indonesian military.

I spoke to Pramoedya in Berkeley, Calif., just after he came back from UCSF Medical Center, where he was fitted with hearing aids; his hearing was suddenly better than it had been since 1965.

You haven't left Indonesia in 40 years. What does it feel like to travel again after all this time?

I consider it a personal victory in the face of the fascism and militarism of my own country. And yet my victory is actually riding on the coattails of the struggle of Indonesia's young people and the students.

What has struck you most about America?

The general life, the public life -- where people of all races and ethnicities live together in peace, at least compared with what is going on in my own country right now -- is what I find most touching.

In "The Mute's Soliloquy," you are very open about what you see as your faults -- your relationship with your father, your divorce, your sense of failure as a father to your eight children. What was their reaction to this work?

I have lived a solitary life from the time I was a child, so I feel as though I have never really had a relationship with my children. To this day they have never told me how they reacted. I've never asked them about it.

In the West, whenever your name is mentioned, the words "Nobel Prize" come up. What do you think about that sort of expectation?

As I've said many times in response to such questions, not just about the Nobel Prize but about other prizes as well, I'd always rather get a prize that be on the receiving end of repression.

Will you vote on Monday?

No.

Why not?

If I were to participate under these conditions, I would just be choosing my own prison warden.

Why is that?

The elections are being held by the same New Order, with the same New Order bureaucracy, with the same New Order military, with the same money and the same parties.

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