Eka Kurniawan's Man Tiger is (as far as I can recall) my first foray into Indonesian literature, and I have to say that it was a truly sensational start. The novel follows the links between two families in a small, unspecified village in Indonesia, which grow increasingly complex as the novel progresses. That said, the novel's opening line reveals that the boy of the first family, Margio, has just murdered the father of the other, Anwar Sadat, so it's a complicated dynamic from the off. Man Tiger then goes back over the previous year of Margio and Anwar Sadat's lives, subverting the stereotype of the 'whodunit' crime genre by announcing this in the opening line, and instead using the novel to examine why the murder occurred. This unusual plot dynamic has the potential to have less suspense than a classic crime novel, since the reader already knows what will happen in the end, but for Man Tiger it actually has the opposite effect. You see these two men goin...
“You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.” - C.S. Lewis