Cursed with a cleft lip and a disreputable father, Mat has been an outcast since birth in Cottonwood Grove, his village in Indonesia. Never having known love or kindness, he grows up to be a violent and aggressive man, ever ready to kill anyone who annoys him. Inayatun is the village beauty, surrounded by admirers, and flagrantly promiscuous. Miraculously, when this unlikely couple meets, they find true love and happiness in each other. But the past won’t let them be. There are too many in the village who have scores to settle with Mat, and who lust after Inayatun. A plot is hatched which leaves Inayatun and her unborn baby dead. Mat is accused of the murders but is saved from the gallows by the testimony of his grandfather, who mysteriously reappears after 15 years. But the people of Cottonwood Grove take the law into their own hands. A vigilante mob attacks him and leaves him for dead.
Mat’s story is recounted in a coffee shop by the notorious ne’er-do-well Warto Kemplung. What at first seems like a tale of small-town scapegoating and defiant true love ultimately reveals a grudge nursed for generations, and the animosity between peasant farmers and corrupt government forces. Amongst Warto’s listeners is a journalist who decides to serialize the story in his newspaper. But in a startling turn of events, Warto disappears, and a stranger appears on the journalist’s doorstep—leaving him to wonder: who was it who died? Who killed who?
In this brilliant tour de force that combines Javanese oral tradition and urban legend with the literary frame of the unreliable narrator, Mahfud Ikhwan has established himself as one of the most exciting new literary voices to emerge from Asia.
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