The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher J. Koch (Vintage)

There are some novels that haunt you with a single paragraph, a few well-chosen words.

As our world appears more and more unstable and unpredictable, statements of fact carry the same credibility as fortune cookies and entrails of chickens divulge as much as the pronouncements of experts. In these times, the following paragraph holds a special resonance.

"There is a definite point where a city, like a man, can be seen to have become insane...It's always difficult to believe that someone we know has crossed into that territory where no one from our side can reach him and from which messages crackle back that no longer make any sense...That's how it was with Sukarno's Jakarta..."

The Year of Living Dangerously was made into a movie that has become so iconic that its plot has been boiled down into the triangular relationship between Mel Gibson, Sigourney Weaver, and the eerily androgynous Linda Hunt. These three actors have so thoroughly claimed this novel that it is a shock to read it at last and find they are not its central characters. There is only one main character and that is the city of Jakarta, seen through the eyes of journalists who struggle to interpret it to a world that can barely find Indonesia on a map.

These are men who report what they see, hear, and have been told, retreating at the end of the day to an airconditioned hotel bar that they have claimed as their turf. A competitive and jangling community, they drink, tell stories, and cling to each other's company. Jakarta intrudes upon their little sanctuary only as far as they allow it to, and only one of them ventures far beyond it after work--Billy Kwan, the half-Chinese, half-Australian dwarf who searches for his home in the world.

A man of restless intellect, Kwan is an explorer of ideologies, of people, of places, a photographer whose images define his questions. A comic figure to his journalist colleagues, he recognizes a spirit similar to his own in a newly arrived reporter, Guy Hamilton, and offers to be Hamilton's eyes.

As Billy leads Hamilton into Jakarta, the city takes on details, but never a shape, much the same as the antagonistic policies of Indonesia's leader, Sukarno. Poverty and danger lie in Jakarta's shadows, as well as the strained tension that mounts with each of Sukarno's speeches. Confrontation is the prevailing theme, and as Sukarno becomes more and more impassioned and his enemies are found closer and closer to home, no one feels safe.

In a city filled with foreboding and menace, disaster seems to be the only possible outcome. Love dissolves into mistrust, friendship into betrayal, and why this is happening is as much a mystery as how it will all end. Physical descriptions pinned to a page with words are the only concrete truth, and those descriptions are where this novel soars.

Sukarno is deposed, half a million people are slaughtered, the journalists are sent to the next global hotspot, and Jakarta goes on living. The place that is evoked so tangibly by Christopher Koch remains, unconsumed by its year of insanity and uncertainty. Decades later, our twenty-first century world, caught in its own insane and unncertain epoch, perhaps can find comfort in Jakarta's survival.

The Girl from the Coast by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Hyperion Books)

She was small and beautiful and only fourteen when she was taken from her seaside village in Java. Carried in the unfamiliar luxury of a carriage, wearing gold and clothes more elaborate than she had ever known before, she was given in marriage to an aristocrat in the city, a man powerful enough that he had no need to rouse himself from his afternoon nap to witness his new bride's arrival. So young that she had not yet begun her monthly cycles, married to a dagger that had represented her husband during the wedding ceremony, the girl was still a child, a fisherman's daughter who had been happy while living among wind, waves and boats and unaware that she was poor until the day that she was enveloped in wealth.

Bathed in perfume-scented water, adorned with rouge and kohl, in a house where her handmaiden is her only companion and her husband is a stern, soft-handed stranger, the girl becomes a stranger to herself, without a name and without an occupation. Her face is no longer her own, and her life is so truncated that she has no appetite for the food that is plentiful and delicious. Her freedom goes no farther than the garden wall that encloses the house she lives in, and she has lost the ability to give, since nothing that has been presented to her is truly hers. She is taught to recite the Koran by rote without understanding the words she recites, she learns to bake cakes, embroider, turn white cloth into batik. Her hands lose their roughness and her skin turns pale; her wishes are immediately granted by her servants but the girl knows the only real power rests with her husband. She understands that her presence in his house has no more significance than a chair or a mattress; she too is her husband's property. Her life, she realizes, will change only when she becomes a mother, and it does, in ways that she could never have imagined.

Her story has the magic of a fairytale and the power and resonance of a fable, yet it is true. It is one of the world's great writers' tribute to his grandmother, and to the strength and resilience of women who own nothing but their own characters. Imprisoned for his political beliefs for more than seventeen years, Pramoedya Ananta Toer wrote over thirty books and would have accomplished even more, were it not that some were destroyed by the Indonesian military. Among the books that were lost were the two volumes that would have turned this book into a trilogy tracing the history of Toer's family.

Standing alone, this is still a masterpiece. Through the story of an unnamed girl, Toer intertwines true facts with magic realism and offers up a whole world--of large injustices and small triumphs, of the value provided by closely knit communities and the loneliness that can come with affluence, and of the power of stories to keep spirits alive. This is a splendid introduction to a breathtaking body of work as well as a book that would have gained Toer acclaim if it had been the only one that he ever wrote.