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 going about their daily lives and wonder how on earth Margio could have ended up killing Anwar Sadat but it slowly, piece by piece, falls into place.
Man Tiger is not only remarkable for its unusual plot devices but also for its international success - it is the first Indonesian novel to be nominated for the Man Booker International Prize, and is only Kurniawan's second novel to have been translated. However, the language it is translated from is not the Indonesian that you would learn from a grammar book, but rather the dialect Bahasa Indonesia. Several critics fluent in Bahasa Indonesia have noted that several of the nuances are lost simply because the thing being described simply does not exist in the Western World and thus the English language. That said, Man Tiger's Indonesian roots are evident throughout the novel, shown most notably in its somewhat cyclical approach, where it returns to an earlier point in the story to see it from another person's point of view, which is based upon Indonesian oral storytelling traditions.
The supernatural element of the novel, the beautiful white tigress who lives inside Margio, inherited from his grandfather and hugely dangerous, has caused Man Tiger to be referred to as a work of magical realism, and hailed comparison with Gabriel García Márquez. For me, this is not the case at all, as this is the only supernatural element in the story and is reflective more of Indonesian folklore than any sort of literary movement - Kurniawan does not focus the novel around the tiger, but rather the murder, and merely shows how the tiger is involved, making the novel fit better into the crime genre than that of magical realism or the supernatural. And, for me, that makes it all the better. I have often found magical realism quite laborious, as you maneuver in between the supernatural and the real, so the insertion of the supernatural into a crime novel represented something completely different which worked incredibly well, bringing a different kind of tension to the novel and lifting it from a good book to a great book.
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