Word: islanded
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...GLOBAL ADVISOR Getaways: Own an Island! Style Watch: Best Boot Forward...
...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...
...GLOBAL ADVISOR Getaways: Own an Island! Style Watch: Best Boot Forward...
...plot of The Spice Garden revolves around the friendship between the 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...
...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...