Budi Darma (1937–2021)

Budi Darma is an important Indonesian author who attended grad school in Bloomington, Indiana. In the late 1970s he wrote a collection of short stories about Americans living in the Midwest. The narrator/protagonist of each story is a young man, sometimes a student at the university, sometimes a working man, sometimes renting a room from a widow on a residential street, sometimes living in a large apartment building. But in every case, the man finds someone to fixate on, whether a pretty girl he sees as he walks through a neighborhood, a pair of rowdy children, an elderly lady who isn't keeping up her lawn or simply a stranger he would like to meet. In the introductory essay, he is compared to David Lynch and the Coen Brothers and, yes, these stories are often dark, and the narrator is neither reliable nor benign. The narrator often goes to extreme lengths to achieve his ends and he is often, but not always, shocked at the consequences of his own actions.

I like the reversal of the usual white author writing about a faraway land with foreign characters and how Darma didn't make any of the characters charming or simple. He has a sharp eye and a willingness to portray people with all of their worst attributes on display. He does have the habit of many authors writing about a place that isn't their home of mentioning street names and intersections, but that might be fun for people who have been to Bloomington.… (more)