Jakarta

by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano, Thomas Bunstead (Translator)

Overview

In this hallucinatory novel of ruin and reconstruction, a man and his lover search for closure while a virulent plague hastens disaster in the world around them.

In a chaotic city, the latest in a line of viruses advances as a man recounts the fated steps that led him to be confined in a room with his lover while catastrophe looms. As he takes inventory of the city’s ills, a strange stone distorts reality, offering brief glimpses of the deserted territories of his memory. A sports game that beguiles the city with near-religious significance, the hugely popular gambling systems rigged by the Department of Chaos and Gaming, an upbringing in schools that disappeared classmates even if the plagues didn’t—everything holds significance and nothing gives answers in the vision realm of his own making.

The turbulent and sweeping world of Jakarta erupts with engrossing new dystopias and magnetic prose to provide a portrait of a fallen society that exudes both rage and resignation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566895637
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	11/05/2019
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Rodrigo Márquez Tizano (Mexico City, 1984) is a writer. He has been the editor in chief of VICE magazine in Mexico and Argentina and is a founding editor of La Dulce Ciencia Ediciones, a publishing imprint dedicated to the world of boxing. He received his MFA from NYU and is completing a PhD at Cornell University. Jakarta is his first novel.

Thomas Bunstead has translated some of the leading Spanish-language writers working today, most recently The Optic Nerve by María Gainza and The Nocill Trilogy by Agustín Fernández Mallo. His own writing has appeared in publications such as the Paris Review Daily, Times Literary Supplement, and The White Review. He is an editor at the literary translation journal In Other Words.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Jakarta

A Millions Most Anticipated Book of 2019
A Translated Lit Most Anticipated Book of 2019

“An assured but challenging anti-narrative, its offbeat structure evoking a world slipped off its axis.” —Kirkus

“Dense with imagery and boundless imagination . . . Blending the wildly dystopian with the mundanity of the everyday, this time-jumping narrative is a bolt of originality from a writer to watch.” —Publishers Weekly

“A kaleidoscopic take on love and loss and longing, written in a voice that is sharp and cynical yet somehow without despair . . . a deft and deeply rendered work.” —The Los Angeles Times

“Tizano fashions an original, astonishing, and terrifyingly unhinged dystopia. . . . Thomas Bunstead adds to an impressive resumé with a seamlessly literary and peppery translation from the Spanish.” —The Millions

“A taut novel, with lyrical prose.” —World Literature Today

“The beginning of a promising literary career.” —The Star Tribune

“This challenging, provocative short novel conjures fever-dreams of a city ravaged by plague . . . horror-touched rather than horror itself, with beguiling short chapters and a mad variety of interests.” —Shelf Awareness

“Superb. . . . this novel signals the arrival of a unique, important voice on the American literary landscape.” —Southwest Review

“Tizano’s distinctive style and his boundless imagination are a thrill to read.” —Locus Magazine

“A wonderfully cathartic text, in the truest Aristotelian sense, one that tackles extremely difficult and unfortunately poignant subject matter and handles it with supremely gratifying deftness.” —Angel City Review

“Mind-blowingly original, powerful and stark prose, captivating rhythm, and haunting, memorable imagery. Tizano is a master of the uncanny.” —Valeria Luiselli

“A remarkable book, a layered exploration of a devastated world unlike anything I’ve ever read before.” —Colin Winnette

“Jakarta is what all novels should be and few are: a cultural narrative, a trace of unhinged civilization where individuals function like particles, suffering everything while aspiring to nothing but the cruel, unnoticed, even unwarranted heroism of the great anonymous histories.” —Sergio Chejfec

From the Publisher

2019-08-19
An impressionistic, abstract portrait of a society clawing back from a viral epidemic.

The unnamed narrator of Tizano's debut lives in Atlantika, which seems constructed out of stray parts from other dystopian novels. The ruling government is a technocratic autocracy that soothes the populace by encouraging it to bet on games of Vakapý, a modified version of jai alai played by robots. (The Orwellian-sounding Department of Chaos and Gaming handles the transactions.) A devastating outbreak called the Ź-Bug has wiped out a chunk of the population, and the narrator of the novel is a veteran of the Ź-Brigađe, charged with clearing rats from sewers and other unpleasant sites. Back at home, the narrator's partner, Clara, is consulting with a large, vaguely oracular glowing stone that calls up, among other things, memories of the narrator's classmates at a religious school before they were pressed into Ź-Bug service. The novel's milieu evokes Philip K. Dick at his gloomiest, and the narrator's mood can be as defeated as anybody's in Atwood or Orwell. ("Progress, hope, all of that: I never bought any of it.") Its style is unique to Tizano, however. The novel is structured in numbered paragraphs, each an often digressive study of a childhood memory, a vision from the stone, or Atlantika's despairing society. The nonlinear approach can befuddle, and though translator Bunstead ably stabilizes the tone, stray plot threads can be hard to parse. (Is the snow there really red, or is the narrator imagining things?) The title partly refers to a code name for the narrator, and the story invites readings as an allegory for our loss of identity in the face of social and epidemiological threats. Clear lessons are in short supply, though.

An assured but challenging anti-narrative, its offbeat structure evoking a world slipped off its axis.

Kirkus Reviews