This past month has seen a series of literary and cultural events that at least keep us diverted from the daily dose of distressing news on the current state of the country, which runs the gamut of embezzlement of election funds to foul play in Munir's death. To start with, there was the highly-hyped, anxiously-anticipated Kompas's 40th Anniversary extravaganza, Megalitikum Kuantum, held with fanfare and panache at Jakarta Convention Center on 29th June. As with most high-minded, spectacularly planned mega events, this one was without exception a dud. The program book in fact describes a more intriguing tale than the performance itself. It was meant to be a celebration of Indonesian music from the remotest part of this land, from the earliest time, to this quantum age. As it turned out, it was simply an expensive showcase of Indonesian's ethnomusicology that fails short of grandeur in presentation and excitement in performance. On a different note, the announcement for this year's Best Kompas Short Story had been again another worthwhile event to attend. Kuntowijoyo, the respected Indonesian man of letters and professor at Gajah Mada University who passed away this February, won the prize through a short story called Jalan Asmaradana, a tale about a man with a Phd. Degree appointed as the district head trying to act as an intermediary for the dispute of two residents. A delightful piece about men who clash with one another because of their tragic and comic viewpoints. Also on the literary front, the annual Khatulistiwa Literary Award was announced to the public on 29th June, with a few changes in categorization, as well as judging system. This is Khatulistiwa Literary Award's fifth year. The previous winners included Goenawan Mohamed, Remy Sylado, Hamsad Rangkuti, and last year's split winners Seno Gumira Adjidarma and Linda Christanty. This year's award will be given to the best book of prose fiction and the best book of poems. The award carries prize money of Rp. 100 million for prose fiction and Rp. 50 million for poetry. Winners will be announced this September 30, 2005, at the Atrium in Plaza Senayan Mall.

New Fiction

If you're sick of the current list of Chicklit or the over-convoluted thick tomes of serious fiction, I've got a couple slim but compact books, that might persuade you that reading fiction can be both soul-defining and yet entertaining.

The two books I recommend were written by writers in their twenties, hailing not from English-speaking world, but respectively from France and Japan. These writers, Amelie Nothomb, The Book of Proper Names, and Hitomi Kanehara, Snakes and Earrings, have won prestigious awards for their books. Amelie Nothom has been described as France's Literary Lioness, winning the Grand Prix of the Academie Francaise and the Prix Internet du Livre. Hitomi won the coveted Akutagawa Prize. Her book has sold over a million copies. .

For me these writers represent the new breed of writers that write fiction with an attitude, with subjects that they know first hand, retrieving from their experiences from the edge of existence. Hitomi Kanehara, for instance, ran away from home at the age of 11 and started to send stories to her father, a literary translator, to edit. These writers are insouciant, hard-boiled, staring at life with eyes unflinchingly wide open. They write the kind of stuff that Nietzsche or John Fante would call writing with blood.

The Book Of Proper Names
By Amelie Nothomb 183 Pages,
FaberFaber, Rp. 182.000

The book starts with the main character Plectrude hiccupping in her mother's womb. Meanwhile the boyfriend, Plectrude's father, has been playing truant since her mother's pregnancy. It is the last straw when Fabien, the hokey boyfriend, wants to name the baby Tanguy or Joelle, names Lucette considers mediocre. She shoots the boyfriend in the head with a handgun. The story begins in this heady, fast-paced mode and never lets up. Lucette will be incarcerated and at the age of 19 delivered a baby girl, whom, to the puzzlement of all, she named Plectrude, after some obscure saint. Plectrude will be adopted by Lucette's doting sister, Clemence, who has great plans for her sister's child to become a ballerina. As Clemence predicted, the child grows into a gifted child, especially in ballet. However, in her other classes she seems to lag behind. Again, each time when Clemence hears about how slow the child has been in reading or in arithmetic, she shrugs it off with a self-assured grin that confirms her belief more than ever that the child is specially gifted. When the child is threatened to remain in the same for showing no progress, Clemence begins to focus on her reading and numbers skills. She brings home a beautifully illustrated book and puts it before Plectrude. True enough within days the child begins to read voraciously. When however her arithmetic does not show any improvement, they take her to see a doctor for a test of IQ. The result shows she is a genius! At the age of 12, a boy will walk into her class and she will fall head-over-heels for him. His name is Mathieu Saladin. He has a plain face but with a distinctive scar on his mouth that in Plectrude's mind makes him so perfect. The boy ignores her and deep in hurt she flees from her classes and decides to concentrate full time on her ballet. What ensues as a result of this decision, and her mother's reaction to her later in the story, will force her to come to terms with her being. It's a sobering tale of being a youth in straitened circumstances, written without sentimentality or affectation.

Snakes and Earrings
By Hitomi Kanehara 118 Pages,
Vintage, Rp. 99,000

This is again a tale of three teenagers in a world that is out-of-this-world. Lui (she would like others to believe that her name rhymes with Louis Vuitton) and Ama (for Amadeus) and Shiba-san are interlocked in a tragic triangle that begins with Luis's obsession with body modification. She met Ama in a bar and is fascinated by his split-tongue and tattoo. Through Ama, she will then be introduced to Shiba-san, a tattoo expert, who immediately takes a sadistic liking to her. He offers to do her tattoo in exchange for sex. In the intervening chapters we will see how Shiba-san has a weird way of showing his fondness for Lui: he is into snuff and sadomasochism. This secret relationship carries on while Lui lives with the red-haired, pierced, but soft-hearted Ama, who clings on to her like a baby. One night however this baby turns into an infuriating monster when he sees a man try to hustle his girlfriend, Lui. He pummels the lights out of the man and pulls out his teeth and presents them to Lui as a token of his love. Weeks later, Lui reads in an article that police are in search for a red-haired youth who allegedly has committed murder. Lui immediately dyes Ama's hair and asks him to start wearing long-sleeved shirts. Then one night Ama disappears. Throughout, Hitomi has described to us an underground world into which Lui is lured because here Òthe sun does not shine, there are no love songs, and the children's laughter is never, ever heard.' But when Ama disappears, we begin to sense some sort of sentimentality in the part of the hardened Lui. Toward the end we will find out the murderer and the chilling ending when Lui comes terms with herself and her loss of Ama will be one that is unlike any I've read in any novel thus far. It's an unusually humane book, written by a twenty-one year old Hitomi Kanehara. The book, unlike most pretentiously literary fiction, shows how humans truly connect with one another in the real world without any literary pretense. It is written in a no-nonsense, hard-boiled fashion that makes reading it tingling with harsh reality.

Both Kanehara and Nothomb write with the speed and virtuosity of a Jazz musician. By turns unexpected and sometimes appalling, their books represent a new generation of writers that include Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Kraus, that writes with the directness that verges on surrealism. Some of these writers are zanier than others, such as Jonathan Safran Foer that encompasses pastiches of visual elements and whatnot in his fiction, others like Amelie Nothomb and Hitomi Kanehara are, in all their various uncanny manifestations, in fact quite close to the literary tradition, but none is your regular joe or jane of fiction. Theirs is a departure thereof.

Please send comments and suggestions to Richard Oh at litchap@yahoo.com

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