It was during this period that I became acquainted with not only the Indonesian canon but also with the literary maestros of the rest of the world. I easily found the bookstores, from the very large shops to the small stalls that lined the roadsides, as well as the many libraries. Yogyakarta may not be a big city – although it was briefly the capital of the Indonesian republic – but it seemed very large indeed for a boy from a small town, especially when it came to its books.
When I imagined what “literature” meant in those years, novels like that were what came to my mind. Before setting foot on campus, I had only read collections of silat (martial arts fantasy) and horror novels by local writers, with the occasional addition of a hacky romance. I was still an undergraduate at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, to which I came from a small coastal town, Pangandaran. I discovered it at a time when I was new to serious literature. The poor people in this novel, with their simple language, try to speak and to understand the world like intellectuals
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