Early in Leila Chudori’s Home, a seemingly minor exchange takes place between Dimas Suryo, an Indonesian activist and political exile in Paris, and Vivienne Deveraux, a young Frenchwoman. We are in the months following the student protests of May 1968, and Vivienne is raging against the “fucked up” … [Read more...]

In what is presumably late 1965, as Indonesia is racked by violence in the wake of a failed coup blamed on Communists, a gravedigger named Kamino hits upon a novel method of seduction: He allows himself to be possessed by the spirit of a recently murdered Communist so that the Communist’s daughter … [Read more...]

In her novel "The Question of Red", Indonesian author Laksmi Pamuntjak effectively combines the multi-faceted nature of the island state′s sociopolitical system and its bloody recent history with the fate of her fictional protagonists. Bettina David read the book On the Islamic island of Java, … [Read more...]

Between 1965 and 1968 Indonesia entered a violent and tumultuous time. On 30 September 1965 a group of army conspirators gathered in Jakarta with the aim of kidnapping and killing seven army generals, one, Abdul Nasution, was to escape with the other six being killed. On 1 October the 30 September … [Read more...]

Chudori's (9 Dari Nadira) novel debut, awarded the Khatulistiwa Literary prize, is an ambitious saga that intertwines narration from various generations and creates a wide-ranging picture of Indonesia. It opens in the violent 1960s in Jakarta (after Suharto's rise to power), and follows political … [Read more...]