Novel
Merahnya Merah
Not translated into English
Iwan Simatupang · 1968
Synopsis
The hero, whom the novel does not name and calls "our character", has been in turn an aspirant to the religious life, a company commander and executioner during the revolution, then a patient in an asylum; he now lives as a vagrant in a homeless quarter. There he takes in Fifi, an orphaned teenager whose parents were killed by thieves, alongside Maria, the mother of the vagrants, and Pak Centeng, the neighbourhood strongman, and seeks with them a meaning to existence.
Context
Written from March to September 1961, the novel did not appear until 1968, in Jakarta. Presented by its publisher as a "new novel", it proceeds through long monologues and disconcerting dialogues, in which each character embodies a philosophy in action, and questions the absurd, freedom, faith and the place of the marginalised in history. Often reprinted, it was reissued again in 2020. Unlike Ziarah, translated into English and French, it has been translated into neither language.
Who it is for
For readers of novels of ideas that give a voice to the outcasts of post-revolutionary Indonesia.
Prizes and reception
The novel received the national literature prize in 1970, the very year its author died.