Map of the Invisible World: A Novel

Adam and Johan are two Indonesian orphaned brothers, who have become separated as children. Johan grows up in a well to do family in Kuala Lumpur, Adam is raised by a Dutchman who has remained in Indonesia after the independence. The story focusses mainly on Johan and his quest to find his foster father who has been taken away from home by the military. His quest leads him to Margaret, an American professor at the University of Jakarta and old friend of Johan's foster father. And to the turmoil of Jakarta in the 1960's.

I was looking forward to reading this book as I was travelling in Indonesia and Malaysia and was really interested in local literature. However, I didn't really like this novel. Some of the characters were just a little too hysterical (Johan, Margaret, Din) whereas others were completely naive (Adam, Zubaidah). They seemed unreal to me, and so did the plot, that happens to contain too many happy coincidences. So. Very unlike me, I left this novel behind in a hostel. Hope that someone else enjoys it more than me! ( )

Exquisite, careful, lush. ( )

Rambling tale of two Indonesian brothers separated as orphans, now searching for meaning as teens. Expatriate Dutch and American lovers from long ago seek each other. Revolution, unrest and anti-American sentiments. Found these multiple narrative threads a tad choppy when cobbled together. Of interest only to those wanting some insight into living through the 1960s Sukarno period in Indonesia. ( )

Most of the characters in Tash Aw's remarkable, if not flawless, second novel are in search of some kind of truth about the past in order to make sense of their present and future. At its heard is the quest of young Adam de Willeg, the adopted Indonesian son of Karl, born Dutch but who has adopted Indonesian nationality in the wake of the country's independence, to find the older brother he can scarcely remember -- Johan was adopted and taken out of the country, leaving Adam behind in an orphanage -- and his desperate effort to locate Karl, who has been frogmarched out of the home they share on a remote island in the Indonesian archipelago by soldiers.

Aw sets his tale in what President Sukarno declares to be "the year of living dangerously", a year in which Sukarno breaks with the West definitively and in which the country trembles on the edge of civil war. And 16-year-old Adam is, indeed, living dangerously as he travels to turbulent Jakarta, the country's capital,n search of a woman he has never met but who seems to mean a lot to Karl, his father: American anthropologist Margaret Bates, who now works at the university. Margaret has her own past history, both with Indonesia -- the country of her birth, if not her citizenship or origins -- and with Karl, and Adam's arrival literally on her doorstep forces her to come to grips with that. Trained as an anthropologist and raised to be emotionally self-contained, Margaret now finds that the skill she most prizes -- her ability to read people and their unspoken thoughts and emotions -- seems to desert her amidst the chaos. Meanwhile, Adam's encounter with Din, Margaret's enigmatic research assistant, may drive him toward another kind of encounter with history.

The narrative bounces between characters: Adam's quest for identity and his family (both birth and adoptive); his brother Johan's quest for some kind of meaning and purpose within the wealthy family who adopted him but left Adam behind; Margaret's struggle with her unexpected instinct to protect young Adam and the realization that what she felt for Karl as a 17-year-old in Bali has never left her. It's a story about quests: for identity, for meaning, for purpose, for family and for connection; there are themes that range from the complexity of parent-child relationships to violence and injustice. But at its heart, the conundrum at the heart of Aw's novel is a venerable one: in times of chaos and "living dangerously", is there still a place for personal ties and relationships? Or do abstractions -- nationality, politics -- take priority? President Sukarno makes clear to Margaret his own views on the matter: "the time for gifts has passed". He is referring to formal gifts between nations and seems unable to envisage something more personal and individual, any more than Din, an embryonic revolutionary, can do. On the other hand, the novel's main characters strive in their different ways to push beyond this utilitarian definition of relationships.

All this makes for a complex and crowded novel, jammed with ideas. But the writing and the characters triumph, transforming what in the hands of a lesser novelist would be a rambling and perhaps even incoherent story not only accessible but fascinating. Aw, Malaysian by birth, has captured the feel of Southeast Asia -- the scents, the sounds, the quality of the light, even the texture of the air -- in a way that few other authors I've read have managed to accomplish, as well as an incredible sense of the time and era in which the book is set: the chaos of the twilight of Sukarno's rule.

Highly recommended. ( )