In the Small Hours of the Night: An Anthology of Sundanese Short Stories

Literature & Fiction

Literary

The Lontar Foundation

The Anatomy of Travel: Selected Stories Gerson Poyk (Modern Library of Indonesia)

Poyk, Gerson

Violence, money, and melodrama-these are the volatile ingredients of The Rape of Sukreni. Written in the 1930s by A.A. Panji Tisna, a prince of the Balinese state of Buleleng, the novel is the author's best-known work and is still in print today.  Sukreni is a modern Indonesian classic that draws on the melodramatic conventions of Balinese theater to present a powerful indictment of the commercialization of Balinese society. While on one level the novel appears to be concerned with the Balinese-Hindu notion of karma, its main thematic thrust is in fact the impact of modern commerce on Balinese society. Modern commerce, the author argues, is animated by a morality which robs people of their humanity. In Balinese society an inhuman commercial ethic is turning people against all that is good and refined in themselves and their society.  Even more telling today than it was when it was written, The Rape of Sukreni offers a unique and dark insider's view of the island's future that violently challenges the conventional image of Bali as a honeyed paradise filled with artists and happy tourists.

The Rape of Sukreni: Novel

Tisna, Anak Agung Pandji

Contemporary

Twilight in Jakarta: Novel

Lubis, Mochtar

As a flight attendant for the new Indonesian Airlines, Elisa is determined to establish her independence and find a place where she really belongs. With a troubled family background and almost no knowledge of her ancestors, Elisa is searching for her true identity. The search for her true father proves to be heartbreaking and Elisa grows to hope that her marriage to a handsome Javanese man she fell deeply in love with will give her a sense of belonging and stability. In this novel, Elisa learns what it means to be a young woman finding her way in the troubled early years of Indonesia’s independence.

Departures: Novel

Dini, Nh.

The Saga of Siti Mariah by Haji Mukti is a window into the workings of cultuurstelsel, a forced cultivation system imposed by the Dutch colonial government in the Dutch East Indies around the 1830s to the 1870s. Embedded in the pages of the book are the lives of Dutch sugar barons, the indigenous elite, European officials, and Chinese middlemen who became rich under the system, intersected by Javanese peasants who suffered under its yoke.

The Saga of Siti Mariah: Novel

Mukti, Haji

Before Dawn is a poetry collection written by Sapardi Djoko Damono: with contents written from 1961 to 2001, portraying the poet at different stages of life. Opened by “One Night”, written in 1964 when he was a young Moslem boy crying outside a church door as his classmates celebrated Christmas, the book ends with “Before Dawn”, written in 2001 when he was much older, pondering about frailty and mortality. Through his poems―the meaning, the sounds, the rhythm―Sapardi has proven himself capable of depicting the imaginative awareness of experience.

Before Dawn: Poetry

Damono, Sapardi Djoko

Poetry

The 1953 publication of Sitor Situmorang's Green Paper Letter pegged him as a rising poet. Six decades later, the writer is still active. The more than one hundred poems in this book were selected from the several thousand he wrote. The main characteristics of Sitor's poems are the simplicity of its wordplay and the clarity of its syntax. Sitor's poetry are a poetry of words; they evoke concepts and call up a series of pictures and images. In his poems, we find a poignant blend of personal experiences and philosophical reflection.

To Love, to Wander: Poetry

Situmoran, Sitor

The Dancer, a trilogy, recounts the tumultuous days of mid-1960s Indonesia. It highlights the lives of Srintil, a dancer, and Rasus, a bewildered young man torn between tradition and political progress. Through experience, both learn the concept of shame and sin: Rasus after he leaves their village and journeys into the world and Srintil when the world finally comes crashing into her remote village. The Dancer gives a ground-level view of the political turmoil leading up to and following the coup in 1965. In 2011, a movie produced by Shanty Harman and directed by Ifa Irfansyah was made based on this trilogy.

The Dancer: Novel (Modern Library of Indonesia)

Tohari, Ahmad

First published in 1927, Kwee Tek Hoay’s The Rose of Cikembang is an excellent example of the peranakan literature of the Netherlands East Indies that flourished between the 1900s and 1942 when the Japanese occupation in Indonesia began. Highly sentimental, the novel is rich in many of the controversial themes that Kwee was famous for: interracial love and the lives of its offspring, fate and karma, mysticism and reincarnation. In pre-war Indonesia, Kwee Tek Hoay’s novels were loved by urban readers. The Rose of Tjikembang, his most popular novel, was filmed twice, first in the early 1930s and again in the 1970s.

The Rose of Cikembang: Novel

Hoay, Kwee Tek

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