Passage to Indonesia

Dear Reader,

Let’s start with an excerpt from a novel I am reading, A Dark Tale From Cottonwood Grove, by Mahfud Ikhwan, translated by Annie Tucker.

“He was well-acquainted with death. His mother had died giving birth to him. His grandfather, the person who loved him most in the world, had left him, vanished, assumed dead when he was only five years old. He had witnessed the death of his depraved father, who hated him, after his body had been flattened by an Indonesia bus on the Semarang-Surabaya route just as he stepped out of his favourite palm wine stall. There were also the people Mat Dawuk had killed. And there was his own soul; Mat Dawuk himself had survived numerous brushes with death. But all of those had just been called ‘dying’. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t often heard the word “gone” and needed some time to process it.

‘Gone,’ he murmured once more, like an elementary school student trying to sound out a difficult word.”