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.

Translated by: Stephen J. Epstein