19 Apr / People from Bloomington by Budi Darma, translated by Tiffany Tsao [in Shelf Awareness]
More than four decades after its Indonesian debut, the fascinating People from Bloomington by Budi Darma (1937-2021), one of Indonesia’s most lauded authors, arrives for English-language readers. Darma (Conversations) wrote these seven stories in peripatetic jaunts between 1976 and 1979, when he was a master’s and then Ph.D. student at Indiana University in Bloomington. This edition opens with 40 essential pages, which include feminist writer/academic Intan Paramaditha’s edifying foreword, novelist/translator Tiffany Tsao’s discerning introduction, and a “lightly revised” version of Darma’s original 1980 preface.
Jane Austen was the subject of Darma’s Ph.D. thesis, that focus reflected in Darma’s many nods to her novels, as well as other Western classics. Each story is revealed through a male, first-person narrator; most are students living in transitional rental housing. Absurd and often threatening situations loom: an aging World War II veteran wandering town with a pistol; a man’s slyly vicious attacks on a neighboring family; a man who unintentionally discovers his biological father and orchestrates his demise.
If the Western canon is rife with exotification of the other, this short story collection is especially rare for its Asian author writing about everyday American Midwesterners. In Darma’s acknowledgments, written in 2020, both Paramaditha and Tsao (The Majesties) win praise for putting his collection in a global context: “Paramaditha for her succinct reflection… in relation to Indonesian literature” and Tsao for “her analysis… with respect to Western literature in general and English literature in particular.” Beyond the specificities of Bloomington, each of Darma’s narratives heightens the universal human longing for connection.
Review: modified from “Fiction,” Shelf Awareness, April 15, 2022
Readers: Adult
Published: 1980 (Indonesia), 2022 (United States)