Word: archipelago
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...publicist's bombast. Yet when Robert Wilson's I La Galigo premieres in Singapore on March 12, it will be literally true: the four-hour spectacle of song and dance, mantra and martial arts is based upon a classic of Indonesian literature, an epic poem almost unknown outside the archipelago until now. The poem, also called I La Galigo, survives in thousands of fragmentary manuscripts and was written in an archaic Indonesian language that maybe no more than 50 people today are able to understand. It runs to some 300,000 lines?roughly 20 times the length of Homer...
...democracies, at least, intelligence agencies depend on a shared public belief that their cause is just, even if their methods are sometimes unsavory. Blair never convinced a lot of people in Britain that the Iraq war was just - and those who resent him for it now form an archipelago of the disaffected. Inside the spy agencies, on the Labour backbenches and among potential juries trying government leakers, they can exercise power, too - a crude, perhaps self-absorbed, form of democracy, but effective...
...produce stick figures representing various factions and points of view, who hold forth in preachy, predictable allegories. Yet in The Spice Garden, his debut novel, Michael Vatikiotis, editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review, has constructed an engrossing narrative of mass hysteria and mob violence set in the Maluku archipelago, Indonesia's spice islands, during the horrific bloodbath that swept across the area...
...Vatikiotis' Noli is a scantly fictionalized version of the Bandas, a tiny cluster of some of the most beautiful and remote islands in a region where remote, beautiful islands are the norm. Like the Bandas, Noli is separated from the other islands in the Maluku archipelago by a wide expanse of sea, and has a population nearly evenly composed of Christians and Muslims. And the Noli nut is obviously a variation on nutmeg, which made the Bandas a geopolitical prize in the age of discovery during the 15th and 16th centuries...
...arrival of colonizing religions and which still commands a wide following. Since Joseph Conrad's early 20th century tales of the tropical seas, very few foreign, competent storytellers have taken Indonesia for their subject. With this interesting novel, Vatikiotis makes a valuable contribution to the literature of the archipelago...