THE DOG MEOWS, THE CAT BARKS

A pensive portrait of rural anomie.

Kurniawan, the first Indonesian writer to be longlisted for the International Booker Prize, is a deeply learned student of his nation’s troubled recent past, when the army, declaring martial law, executed as many as a million Communists. This morality tale is set years later, the government now busy battling Islamists. All this is of little interest to young Sato Reang, who, having reached school age, has just been circumcised in the expectation that he will now become a Muslim “pious child,” meaning he’ll have to pray five times daily, fast during Ramadan, and fear God. “Why couldn’t kids just laze around? Go running in dried-out ditches chasing lizards? In my heart, I vowed to disobey.” So resolves Sato Reang, and he does, defying a father, a strict observer, who goes so far as to take a machete to Sato Reang’s beloved soccer ball, seeing it as an unholy distraction. “We’re lucky that God didn’t ask humankind to pray a thousand times a day,” grumbles the kid, who grows into adolescence with his father visiting fresh punishments on him—burning a stuffed monkey he’d won for his sister at a forbidden fair, for one. His father dies “with worms and maggots keeping him company,” at which point, taking a lesson from that incineration, Sato Reang has been committing acts of arson, peeing on going-to-market produce, drinking beer, and watching porn. “I loved fire,” Sato Reang exults. “I’d even heard that in hell God had entrusted fire with the task of burning off sins.” He’s not quite Meursault, but Sato Reang is definitely a bad influence, which plays out when, disastrously, he lures a truly pious child astray. Kurniawan’s story, novella more than novel, seems sure to offend fundamentalist sensibilities, and has plenty of unsettling moments for the secular reader, too.

A memorable look into a delinquent mind, one with little hope for any future other than hell.