Indonesia | Indonesian | Short Fiction
July, 2020“Joshua Karabish” is one of the seven short stories that make up The People of Bloomington (Orang-Orang Bloomington)—a haunting and darkly humorous collection originally published in 1980. Reissued in 2004, and released again in 2016, it is one of the most beloved and influential literary works in Indonesia today.
Human nature in all its peculiarity and contradiction takes center stage in these tales. The characters feel their loneliness acutely and yet deliberately estrange others. They unconsciously crave human affection and approval, yet act in inexplicably reprehensible ways. Throughout the collection, pestilence snakes among and through the characters, with people suffering from mysterious illnesses, believing themselves to be gravely ill, or terrified of contracting diseases from others.
The stories are nominally set in Bloomington, Indiana, where the author lived as a graduate student in the 1970s. But the Bloomington of the stories is an otherworldly, almost surreal, town. It’s an environment, alienating and bordering on alien, sectioned into apartment units and rented rooms, and gridded by streets and partitioned from other towns by distances traversable only by car. A place where the solitary can all too easily remain solitary. Where people can at once be obsessively curious about others, yet fail to form genuine connections with anyone.
Eerie, estranging, yet comic and profoundly sympathetic, The People of Bloomington broke new ground content-wise and voice-wise in Indonesia, and is still utterly distinctive, and strange, in the present.
- Tiffany Tsao
The Brooklyn Rail welcomes you to our web-exclusive section InTranslation, where we feature unpublished translations of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and dramatic writing. Published since April 2007, InTranslation is a venue for outstanding work in translation and a resource for translators, authors, editors, and publishers seeking to collaborate.
We seek exceptional unpublished English translations from all languages.
Fiction, Nonfiction, and Poetry: Manuscripts of no longer than 20 pages (double-spaced).
Plays: Manuscripts of no longer than 30 pages (in left-justified format).