How do you explain technology and its presence in human life? Okky Madasari does it well in her latest novel, Kerumunan Terakhir (The Last Crowd). Like her previous novels, Kerumunan Terakhir also tells the story of a victim of repression. But this time, the victim -- as well as the story's … [Read more...]
From Now On Everything Will Be Different, by Eliza Vitri Handayani
February 15, 2016 by
Some of you may have heard about this novel for all the wrong reasons: The launch of From Now On Everything Will Be Different by Eliza Vitri Handayani at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival 2015 was cancelled after warnings from local police, ostensibly because of references to the 1965-66 … [Read more...]
The Red Bekisar by Ahmad Tohari
February 7, 2016 by
This English translation of popular Indonesian author Ahmad Tohari’s Bekisar Merah (2011) tells the story of Indonesian rural women from the mid-twentieth century faced with economic and social changes that arise domestically, such as the advent of electricity and mechanization, and through … [Read more...]
That foreign substance (The original title was: Indonesia’s lost history)
February 5, 2016 by
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...]
Sunday Book Review: ‘Beauty Is a Wound’ and ‘Man Tiger’ by Eka Kurniawan
November 19, 2015 by
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...]
