Radio Buku

In addition to my dissertation research here, I have become involved in an online Indonesian writers and translators group called Aspas, short for Apresiasi Sastra, or Literature Appreciation.  I am helping them edit a couple of short stories that have already been translated, and translating a few stories myself.  The leader, Sigit Susanto is a writer and translator (he translated Kafka into Indonesian) who currently lives in the Netherlands, but he’s shared his network of friends so I’ve gotten to meet some interesting literary types here in Yogya.

Via Aspas, a couple of weeks ago I was invited to be interviewed for an internet radio show called Radio Buku, or Book Radio.  Ardyan, the guy who interviewed me, is a Westerns fan currently writing his undergraduate thesis on representations of the American border in Cormac McCarthy.  We talked about how I came to be in Indonesia, my top five favorite books (which was a really hard question, and I had to pick kind of arbitrarily except for, of course, The English Patient and The Family of Man), my opinion about the role of public libraries in a democracy, and etc.  You can listen to the interview (in Indonesian!), see a picture of me in the studio, and browse their website here.  To hear my segment, wait for my picture to pop up and then click on it.

The radio show is connected to a wonderful lending library in the cultural heart of Yogya, right near the palace, which specializes in books on literature, language, and nation.  There was a huge woodblock print on the wall proclaiming that you can’t have a democracy without access to books.  Membership costs 100,000 Rupiah (about $10), is valid for 20 years, and means that you can both take out books and hang out there whenever you want.  (This also means, you can nap there whenever you want.  When I arrived a pretty young girl in a yellow jilbab greeted me, and by the time I was done with the interview she was cashed out face down on the rug in the middle of the room and stayed that way until I left.  Public and unabashed napping, just another reason to love this country).

I am totally going to become a member because while printing is much more vibrant than it used to be in Indonesia, it’s still really hard to find copies of literary books, even from just a handful of years ago.  They had a copy of a book I’ve been dying to read by a well-known novelest Eka Kurniawan called Cantik itu Luka (Beauty is a Wound), which starts with the description of an old prostitute rising from the dead twenty years after she has been buried.