Despite their reader-empowering name, choose-your-own-adventure books are more distinguished by the limits placed on the reader’s choice of path than any broad freedom of literary navigation. At most you will have three or four possible paths, and all are bound to lead to the end. What’s more, even … [Read more...]
Orang-Orang Bloomington
May 19, 2022 by
Budi Darma’s narrative is always a place where readers will find the darkest sides of human beings: hatred, envy, spitefulness, loneliness, indifference, anger, obsession, resentment. If anyone ever read his works before (for example: Hotel Tua, Kritikus Adinan, or Olenka), they’ll know right away … [Read more...]
Gelombang, a Novel by Dee Lestari
May 18, 2022 by
As expected, Dee Lestari novels always captivated me. I’m amazed by her ability of stringing words to parse complicated understandings into a more easy to grasp sentences. All those theories about dream world are laid out clearly so the story could easily be enjoyed. The spiritual journey of the … [Read more...]
The Reading Life: Budi Darma’s “People from Bloomington”
May 18, 2022 by
I highly recommend the Indonesian writer Budi Darma's People from Bloomington, a collection of short stories newly translated by Tiffany Tsao. Like Darma, I attended graduate school in Bloomington, a beautiful, idyllic college town in Indiana, so I was curious about this book. Although as a … [Read more...]
The Girl from The Coast (1987) by Pramoedya Ananta Toer, a Peasant Girl Turned an Aristocratic Wife
May 18, 2022 by
GABY RUSLI WRITES (in her ongoing series on classic Indonesian literature) — Through versatility and natural eloquence, Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s, The Girl From The Coast (1987), took a seemingly simple story based on the author’s grandmother’s life into a complex metaphor that simultaneously … [Read more...]