Word: archipelagos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
Europe first encountered the Philippines in 1521, when Ferdinand Magellan claimed the archipelago for Spain?and ended up dead after a battle with local chieftain Lapu Lapu. Jessica Hagedorn's Dream Jungle starts with an excerpt from a contemporary account of Magellan's Philippine visit, which describes comely native women clad in nothing but thin strips of bark "before their privies," suggesting that conquest can be inspired as much by lust as God and king...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, no supporter of the Chechen struggle, writes in 1973's The Gulag Archipelago that of all the people in the Soviet camps and in exile, the Chechens were from the "one nation which would not give in, would not acquire the mental habits of submission." The Chechens have lived up to that description. Unlike President Bush with Iraq, Putin can make sure Russians are not reminded of the Chechnya quagmire on a daily basis on TV. But silence is no solution. "I am here because it's the only job I know how to do," says Mikhail...