Word: indonesia
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...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...
...Spice Garden should be notable, if for no other reason, as the first serious novel in English about the sectarian violence in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto. Vatikiotis solves one of the main problems facing the journalist-novelist by cutting himself free from actual events and creating an imaginary spice island he names Noli. He even invents for it a spice?"a hairy nut the size of a plum that stubbornly refused to grow anywhere else...
...leaders of the island's two communities: Father Xavier Lunas, a Catholic priest, and Ghani, a Falstaffian hotelier and fish merchant. At the beginning of the novel, a wedding is being planned between a Muslim boy and a Christian girl. The social cataclysms that have begun to rack Indonesia are felt here only as faraway echoes, until a boatload of survivors of gruesome atrocities in strife-torn Ambon, the capital of Maluku, washes up on Noli's shores. Soon afterward, a gang of jihadist rabble-rousers arrives, with a mandate from sinister elements in the army to create chaos...
...book ends on a strong note, with the island and the young lovers reunited by a shaman, representative of the animist belief system that dominated the islands of Indonesia long before the 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...
...CAPTURED. A PYTHON reported to be 14.8 m long and weighing 447 kg, which would make it the largest snake ever discovered; in Curugsewu, Java, Indonesia. The dark-colored male reticulated python, which is capable of eating up to five dogs a month, would be almost 5 m longer than the previous record holder, a 10-m python shot on Sulawesi, Indonesia...