Writing in ... Indonesia

       In less than a month Indonesia will be Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair, and at Inside Indonesia Petia Dimitrova has a Q & A with Lontar's John McGlynn about Bringing Indonesian literature to the world.

       Meanwhile, at Qantara.de Bettina David writes about a part of the Indonesian literary market we're unfortunately not likely to see much of, in Frankfurt or elsewhere: 'Sastra Islami' -- Islamic popular literature -- in "God's gift to Indonesia".
       Interesting, for example, that:

Unlike the rather elitist Western-influenced literary scene, Sastra Islami is ruled by an ethos of shared idealism, community and mutual motivation -- which fits with the Indonesian love of collective fellowship and personal contact.

       And also that:

The "most inspiring" book in this new wave of Indonesian literature has of course been Andrea Hirata's The Rainbow Troops

       And shocking to hear that the German edition of the next volumes (apparently a two-for-one abridgement) takes considerable liberties, as:

Its view of the West also seems naive. In Hirata's The Dreame, Arai receives an EU grant for a research project at the Sorbonne in which he tries to refute the theory of evolution with Harun Yahya's bizarre "theories" -- though cut from the German translation, many of his Indonesian readers like to believe in them.

       Surely these are exactly the parts that shouldn't be cut -- we want to see these things: "his Indonesian readers like to believe in". (Never mind that many Americans seem to be pretty receptive to Harun Yahya-type interpretations of evolution in the first place .....)
       And I remain disappointed that Habiburrahman El Shirazy's Ayat-Ayat Cinta (which I first mentioned quite a while back, when first looking at this phenomenon) apparently still isn't available in English.