PEOPLE FROM OETIMU

The residents of Timor struggle with the legacy of their colonial past.

In the opening scene, male residents of the town of Oetimu on the island of Timor, formerly a colony of both the Netherlands and Portugal, gather to watch the finals of the 1998 World Cup. As they grumble over Brazil’s unexpected defeat by France, they’re unaware that a murderous gang holds the wife and children of one of the town’s most prominent residents hostage, awaiting his return. After that ominous introduction, Nesi’s novel, originally published in Indonesia in 2018, devolves mostly into loosely linked accounts of the lives of a handful of characters connected to the town, some in only marginal ways. Among them is Sergeant Ipi, a brutally corrupt police officer who’s born there when his mother—the daughter of a Portuguese diplomat who was taken prisoner and raped by Indonesian soldiers—stumbles into the town after escaping her captors. He’s raised by Am Siki, a man distinguished for his storytelling talent, who fought the Japanese when they occupied the island during World War II. On the night of the soccer match, Ipi is anticipating his implausible marriage to Silvy, a beautiful, brilliant young woman with her own history of sexual violence, some of it at the hands of a morally bankrupt priest. Although a translator’s afterword provides some history of the period that culminates in the overthrow of Indonesia’s Suharto regime in 1998, the novel will be hard going for any reader not at least reasonably familiar with these events. A list of acronyms identifies eight political parties or other groups in whose activities various characters participate, but this offers, at best, minimal context to foreign readers. A few scenes in the magical realist style come as a welcome diversion, but despite a handful of startling moments, the novel’s plodding pace robs it of most of its narrative tension until it comes full circle in its final pages.

A promising opening scene devolves into an often confusing journey through contemporary conflicts in Indonesian politics.