Indonesian author/academic Intan Paramaditha, who lives in Sydney, offers the chilling Night of a Thousand Hells, a sprawling, polyphonic examination of horrific suicide bombings. Stephen J. Epstein returns as translator after The Wandering and Apple and Knife, joined by novelist Tiffany Tsao (The Majesties).
On May 13, 2018, six bombers associated with an ISIS-connected organization detonated three explosions in Kotawijaya, Indonesia. A family of four were among the perpetrators--Annisa, the mother, Muhammad, her husband, Gibran, their nine-year-old son, and Patricia, their two-year-old daughter. Muhammad and Gibran targeted the Church of the Sacred Heart; Gibran survived. Annisa, with Patricia, chose a residential complex's multipurpose hall where an Islamic study group for transgender women was in session.
Paramaditha introduces Annisa as "the beautiful sister, the pious one, the apple of Papa's eye." Her death means her story must be told by others: "This is a tale of three sisters," Paramaditha promises. "But this also is the tale you didn't ask for, a tale of the unseen, the unheard, the unremembered. The two who remain seek clues--why, whose fault, when?" Mutiara, the oldest, is "the caretaker," the role both "duty and curse." Her youth was devoted to their late mother; their father now lies in a Jakarta hospital, which is where Muti sees the heinous, proliferating news broadcast. On the other side of the world is Maya, "the traveler," who first landed in New York City with a scholarship for graduate school. Now she's put her history Ph.D. dissertation on hold to "reimagine [their] grandmother's life and turn it into fiction." The gruesome cataclysm calls her back to resentful Mutiara to face the aftermath of Annisa's incomprehensible decisions. To do so will require confronting the past, including their grandmother's manipulations, their parents' silenced secrets, and their own actions of betrayal and destruction. The two surviving sisters are joined by Rohadi--a servant raised as playmate, even sister--who reappears, now as Rosalinda, and whose chosen mother was among Annisa's victims.
Paramaditha likely found inspiration in a May 2018 three-part suicide attack in Surabaya, Indonesia, in which a couple involved their young children. Paramaditha writes effortlessly across genres, blending dysfunctional family epic, haunting folklore and horror, with themes of suffocating traditions, pervasive gender inequity, and LGBTQ+ discrimination and identities. Her peripatetic locations beyond Indonesia--the U.S., Australia, New Zealand--suggest an aspirational longing for elsewhere, away from generational entrapment, religion, senseless bloodshed. "There is no answer to be found in this story, no magic pill," she warns. Bearing witness is the only alternative. --Terry Hong
Shelf Talker: A suicide bomber's older sisters confront the brutal tragedy's aftermath in Intan Paramaditha's provocative, chilling Night of a Thousand Hells.