Larung is one of the first book that I have managed to read in 2020! A Malay novel to add to that. A little bit of history as to how I came about to know that this book exists. In 2019, I was selected to be one of the top thirty-six writers in a competition organised by Berita Harian, known as Mencari Kristal. This comes with the privilege of being invited to attend a series of Malay writing workshops. I also got to mingle with some of the most prolific writers, not just from Singapore, but also from Malaysia and Indonesia. It was the most humbling experience ever.
During the workshop, some of these writers were gushing over one of the invited speaker, Ayu Utami, the same way I would be gushing over Mariah Carey or Ziana Zain. And some of them told me that I should try reading the book, Larung, which is apparently written by Ayu Utami. Mind you, it was not easy to find the book. Many physical bookstores that I went to, including MPH in Malaysia told me that the book is out of stock and no longer in print. I remembered some of the writers from the workshop told me that the book was a hot-seller, and has sold over a million copies, which is quite a feat for a South-East Asian writer. The question I have here is; why then did the company stop printing the book since there is always a demand for the book in the market?
My search continues. I tried looking it up in the National Library Board (NLB)’s catalogue and they do have a copy of it; in the reference section. Here is a confession—I am a slow reader, and would usually take more than a week to read a novel that is about 150 pages long. As such, I know a copy in the reference section will not cut it; I can’t borrow it out of the library, and it would mean that I have to spend the entire two weeks sleeping in the library if I were to read the book completely from the beginning till the last page. So, continued searching big bookshops such as Kinokuniya in both Singapore and Malaysia and BookXcess.
No luck.
I finally searched the library in National Institute of Education (NIE) and II finally found the book! The elation I felt was equivalent to… I guess, finding the holy grail, if I was tasked to find the holy grail, that is.
I read the book the moment I reached home.
The book opened with the most fascinating premise. A man returns to his village, i.e. kampung, with one sole purpose/ intention – to kill his grandmother. What followed next is his journey through jungles and other small villages to find clues as to how to end his grandmother’s life, whom he believes is a practitioner of the dark art, and thus has been made an immortal.
The description of protagonist’s journey through the mystical world and his whole experience with the spirits were so vivid and captivating, especially when, as a reader, we are given an account of what happened when he met his granduncle whom is said to be cursed—one side of his body, the left side to be exact, is totally deformed, so much so, he is missing of a, for the lack of a better word, “family jewel”. The ritual he has to carry out in order to end his grandmother’s life is so elaborate, to the point that it felt like as if the writer truly went through the harrowing experience herself. Those are the things that filled the book from page one to page ninety-three. From then on, the story suddenly took a turn to narrate to us about four different individuals, based on their point of view. From page ninety-four onwards suddenly we have four other characters talking to us about their plight with their own sexuality, relationship with men, dirty politics in Indonesia and feminism. I was totally thrown off, and got really confused at what the book aimed to achieve. It was as if I paid for tickets to watch the movie titled Munafik, but ended up watching Sex and the City. To add to that, the story ended abruptly, like as if it was set-up to a sequel, to which I googled and found out that there was indeed no intention for the book to have a sequel. It has a prequel which focused more on the other 4 different characters, before Indonesia went into social unrest in the 80s and 90s.
Also, reading the books, at times, make you feel like as if you are reading different writings by different writers, haphazardly put together to form up a novel under the name of one writer. It does feel schizophrenics at times. The writing, I mean. It is of no surprise then that there have been rumours that the writer has other shadow writers, working on the novel for her; very much like how Nicki Minaj is rumoured to have her own set of ghost writers.
I am not even going to talk about the ethics of having ghost writers or being one. Just like how I am not even going to recommend or encourage anyone to read this book.
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