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Map Of The Invisible World. Tash Aw (2010)

by Tash Aw(Favorite Author)

3.29 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

000734998X (ISBN13: 9780007349982)

languge

English

genre

Historical Fiction

publisher

Fourth Estate (GB)

review 1: This book seems to purposefully confound my Western preconception that novels should have clear plots with everything resolved and tied up in a nice neat package at the end. In a parallel with the Indonesian tendency to see life as uncontrollable and that "you have to just take things as they come" if you are trying to be just like everyone else in Indonesia, the story pulls one in a lot of different directions and leaves some things undecided. So I guess it's a good picture of real life in Indonesia through the eyes of several characters who partially belong in Indonesia but who are also tied up with European ancestry and the background of colonialism. I feel it's a profound book, but reading it does not give one a superbly satisfying experience of reading a novel with a ... morereally good story.
review 2: Unfamiliar with Indonesian history, this novel presented an aspect of Asian history that revealed the impact of colonialism on the lives of native Indonesians and expats who adopted the country as their home. The story is told through the experiences of two orphaned brothers separated by their adoptions by different families in different countries and that of an American woman university instructor living in Jakarta during the turbulent sixties when mass demonstrations and uprisings were taking place in a movement to free the country from European imperialistic intentions under President Sukarno's autocratic rule. I was completely engaged in my reading of this novel by the author's descriptions which effectively portrayed the tensions and chaos of this era of Indonesian history and I'm anxious to read his books. less

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