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3.0 

Jakarta

By Rodrigo Márquez Tizano & Thomas Bunstead
Jakarta by Rodrigo Márquez Tizano & Thomas Bunstead digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

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.

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3 Reviews

3.0
“The Bug, in its earliest instances, arrived from another continent, but it was here that it found its optimum environment. We should be honest about this. In a futuristic but dilapidated city, an unnamed man and his mistress find themselves apartment-bound between waves of an epidemic, drawn to the power of a mysterious stone that allows them to glimpse flashes and scenes of their own past and become lost in a world that was. I think this book, as mentally dangerous as it is, is best read in a time like this. I don't think I'd have as much appreciation for what Tizano is doing without experiencing, in some way, what our narrator is experiencing. His city experiencing reoccurrences of what they call "the Bug" (and notate different strains as Bug A, Bug B, etc.) which our narrator has been tasked as a hazmat worker against. He shares visceral memories of tracking down contagion-spreading rats, to times spent gambling on the national sport that seems to be a form of government control, and his days in school and his cohort there. I saw one review refer to this nonlinear path through his memories as "a stone skipping across the surface of a dystopia" and that's exactly how it feels. What I connected with was the narrator's homebound state and the way he became addicted to the memories and feelings the stone allowed him to experience, of times before and a life that seemed to not nearly exist anymore. It's almost impossible in this story to track what the present is vs the past but that's not the point. Our narrator is experiencing memories of what he can no longer touch and, in a way, it feels cathartic going through that right now as I've been forced to stay home and ride out the virus in isolation for nearly four weeks now during our own pandemic. While I don't have a mystical stone from space, I see it in my memories and in movies and TV shows that feel like they're from "the before times." There's also the element of colonialism at play. The narrator mentions the Bug comes from far away but found a home here (the city is unspecified but has Mexican inspiration) and, somehow, this Bug found its way into the bodies of the citizens with the narrator pointing out towards the end that the virus was inside them all along and all it took was enough people to realize it for it to spread again. The virus being fear, greed, any adverse adjective you can ascribe to colonialism and capitalism. There's fascinating layers to this work. A very layered and interesting read but maybe take some caution since it feels a little close to reality right now.”

About Rodrigo Márquez Tizano

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 Nocilla Trilogy by Agustín Fernández Mallo. His own writing has appeared in publications such as the Paris Review Daily, the Times Literary Supplement, and the White Review. He is an editor at the literary translation journal In Other Words.

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