30 Ergebnisse - Zeige 1 von 20.

In my mind rose a misty picture of a little girl in a floral dress. As for her face: nothing. I could only hope that she had been pretty. I sat overcome. What a procession of developments in one day! Only that morning I had left Madiun, at midday I was wobbling on a buggy past an ocean of rice fields, tonight, suddenly, I had been renamed by my parents and handed a wife. Thus begins Sastrodarsono's life, returning to his village as a newly-...

Born in Ngawi, East Java, in 1932, Umar Kayam obtained his masters degree from New York University and his doctoral degree from Cornell University. It was there, in New York, where he began to hone his literary skills. The publication of his first collection of short stories, A Thousand Fireflies in Manhattan, in 1972, gained him national fame as a short story writer. The light and semi-ironic tone of Kayam's "New York stories, " in which t...

Drought is a joyous celebration of life and human commitment. Its hero is an ex-student, ex-soldier and ex-bandit, who decides to transmigrate to one of the outer islands of Indonesia in order to start life again as a farmer. He almost fails, but so in so doing he is involved with a wonderful range of inspired madmen - bureaucrats, bandits, psychiatrists, religious teachers, and the beautiful woman known simply as the V.I.P. The outsiders hum...

At the time of the construction of the Borobudur in the ninth century, Buddhism had been established in Java for several centuries. Jennifer Mackenzie's Borobodur, an exquisite long poem, tells the story of its legendary architect, Gunavarman, and of Indonesia's mystical monument with cultural understanding, sensitivity, and great feeling. Like Gunavarman by the poem's end, Mackenzie becomes a "dot on the horizon" leaving us stilled in silence

Earth Dance, the story of four generations of Balinese women, centers on conflicts that arise between the demands of caste and personal desires. Narrated by Ida Ayu Telaga, a Balinese woman in her thirties, the novel shows Balinese women-as depicted by her mother, grandmother and female peers-to be motivated by two factors: the yearning to be beautiful, and the desire for a high-caste husband. Headstrong Telaga defies her mother's wishes and m...

First published in 1922, the novel Sitti Nurbaya: A Love Unrealized, by Marah Rusli, retains the poignancy that made it a modern Indonesian classic. In terms of its social impact in what was then the Dutch East Indies, Sitti Nurbaya may be compared to Uncle Tom's Cabin in the ante-bellum United States. Even to this day, the issues of injustice and indignities suffered by women that this novel raised continue to be debated throughout the countr...

Synopsis: Kidnapped from Java, along with her older cousin, five year-old Mirah is taken to the Banda islands where she spends the rest of her life on a nutmeg plantation. She is first taken in as a servant by the Dutch estate owner, then works as a contract nutmeg picker and finally, when his wife leaves him, she is forced to become the man's concubine with whom she bears two children. Mirah lives out her life-through the Dutch colonial era, ...

The Pilgrim is one of the most unusual novels to have ever been published in Indonesia. It is a complex mixture, uniting a poetic lyricism with meditation on life, death and art. The novels chief characters are an artist and a cemetery overseer, the former representing emotion and the latter, reason, conflicting aspects of human nature. Despite the characters' antagonism and cruelty they are, in some ways, very similar: both represent forms of...

Putu Wijaya's novel Telegram, published in 1973, has been heralded as a milestone in Indonesian fiction and as a trendsetter in its synthesis of reality and fantasy. Its first-person narrator is a Balinese journalist living in Jakarta with his adopted daughter. Early on he receives a telegram passing on word that his mother is seriously ill. But nothing is as it seems in Telegram. As readers are brought in to the stream of consciousness meande...

Indonesian author Julia Suryakusuma reminds us that "literature is ultimately about life, " a sentiment echoed by fellow countryman Seno Gumira Ajidarma when he wrote, "While journalism speaks with facts, literature speaks with the truth." The truths found in the fourteen stories included in this collection derive from the historical, political, social, and cultural circumstances that circumscribe the lives of women in contemporary Indonesia a...

Doctor Sukartono, able and devoted to his work, and his wife, Tini, a beautiful and independent woman, find their marriage devoid of communication and warmth. Tini feels herself the victim of her husbands medical practice and refuses to play the role of devoted and self-sacrificing wife. Sukartono is unable to understand his wife's rebellion and, in the mists of this inner confusion, meets Rohayah, a woman who is ready to give him the security...

The stories in Family Room together make up a sojourn through time and space, with the reader traveling from Indonesian villages and remote islands to the capital city of Jakarta, and then to Victoria Park in Hong Kong and onwards to refugee camps in Kashmir, and expedition camps near the lakes of Finland. The mosaic of family rooms, filtered through the feelings and eyes of narrators with heightened subjectivities, gives one the sense of what...

The Fall and the Heart by S. Rukiah is one of the lesser known classics of the Indonesian revolutionary era and arguably the strongest piece of prose writing by an Indonesian woman author before the 1970s. Rukiah's account of a young, middle-class womans's experiences with her lover, her family, and the struggle for independence is deceptive in its simplicity and through The Fall and the Heart Rukiah presents a rare and thoughtful rendition of...

The final days of World War II serve as the backdrop for this novel by Ismail Marahimin. Fighting has not reached the small Sumatran village of Taratakbuluh, but the quiet, tradition-bound way of life in this remote outpost on the jungles edge has nonetheless been transformed, for the Japanese have chosen it as the site of a prisoner-of-war camp for Dutch internees. And the War is Over is the tensely drawn story of the people of Taratakbuluh a...

This volume of Menagerie brings together, under one cover, twenty stories by or about "people like us": Indonesian gay men, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgender persons. This is a book that should have come out (pun intended) a long time ago. Not only do the stories herein disprove the persistent but baseless myth that all forms of sexuality and sexual behavior that fall outside the norm of accepted heterosexual behavior (wherein the man is al...

As Soeharto's New Order government became increasingly authoritarian, censoring and crushing public opposition openly and often brutally, there was a clear shift in playwriting style from allegorical fairy tales of wordplay, humor and oblique reference to a more direct engagement, interrogation, and call to arms. All in all, Indonesian drama during the New Order provides a fascinating window into a society in transition caught between the lega...

The first four decades of the national art theater in Indonesia (1926-1965) were a period of fascinating experimentation undertaken by elite intellectuals heavily influenced by, and attempting to come to terms with, the forms and styles of western theater. These experiments ranged chiefly from hybrid anti-colonial allegories and grand historical epics to psychological and social realism. This volume contains a selection of plays representative...

The popular stages of urban Indonesia offer windows on inter-ethnic cultural obsessions and signs of participation in global trends. This volume brings together representative plays from the 1890s until the 1960s. It includes examples of the diverse genres that make up Indonesian popular theater: komedi stambul, opera derma, tonil, sandiwara and lenong.Authors: H. Krafft, Lie Kom Hok, Kwee Tek Hoay, Astaman, Andjar Asmara, Kotot Soekardi, D. S...

The novel Salah Asuhan, translated here as Never the Twain, is among the most popular works of modern Indonesian fiction. First published in 1928, the book is still in print today. Hanafi, the novel's protagonist, is madly in love with Corrie du Bussee, a beautiful Eurasian, though he has long been betrothed, to his cousin, Rapiah. Which woman should Hanafi marry? Corrie, the feisty, liberated Western woman, or the simple-hearted Rapiah? The c...

The new novel by Michael Vatikiotis is a fast-paced, intensely emotional drama of Indonesian life high and low, set against the tumultuous backdrop of the "reformasi" era, after the fall of Suharto in 1998. The Painter of Lost Souls is the story of Sito, a gifted artist who leaves his home in a poor village in Central Java while still in his teens, to make his name and his fortune in the royal city of Jogjakarta. There he falls in with an i...