Here is a book by a famed Indonesian author that I read in Indonesia. This will be hard to believe, but truly it was conincidental. So desperate am I for reading matter that I bought this on some New York Times recommendation, and only vaguely noticed where it was set till I began reading it. It is at first all about this guy who has a white tiger living inside him. I was all set for a great heaping dose of magical realism. But in fact this is a delicate little story about an unhappy family. It set in a rural location, and charmingly assumes a lot of knowledge of Indonesian small-scale farming. Here we are in one character’s backstory, about his rice farm, on page one:
Jahro, who had never heard of Orion – the short season cultivar – replaced his rice with peanuts, which were more resilient and less trouble.
Imagine never having heard of Orion (!). There is one line that haunts me, nothing to do with rice farming, all about the old father looking back:
The years had gone by so quickly, life receding in the distance like a train narrowly missed
It was a sweet and sad little book. The white tiger really was neither here nor there.