Telegram: Novel

Putu Wijaya’s debut novel, Telegram, was a literary trendsetter for its synthesis of reality and fantasy. Unapologetically disorienting, the text offers a compelling portrait of Jakarta and Bali in the early 1970s. The novel’s first-person narrator is a Balinese journalist living in Jakarta who receives a telegram informing on his mother’s illness. But nothing is as it seems in Telegram. As readers are brought into the stream of consciousness meanderings of this sympathetic yet troubled and unreliable narrator, what is real and what is not becomes increasingly difficult to tell.

• Putu Wijaya, Author

  Putu Wijaya is an extraordinary prolific author, he has written about thirty novels, forty dramas, numerous movie and television scripts, and many short stories and essays. He is also known for Teater Mandiri, widely regarded as Indonesia’s foremost theater collective. Putu’s works has won numerous awards; he has also received recognition from the international community, including a fellowship to study kabuki in Japan, a residency at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, and a Fulbright Scholarship to teach Indonesian theater in US universities. His writings have been translated into Japanese, Arabic, Thai, and a number of Western languages.

• Stephen J. Epstein, Translator