Greatly Reviewed!

These days, I’m really involved in a book called Ayat-Ayat Cinta (Verses of Love) by Habiburrahman El-Shirazy. This is a very best-selling Islamic romantic book in Indonesia. A movie director has moviezed this book and the movie itself enjoys a very good welcome by Indonesian viewers.

Basically, this book tells about a protagonist that is very straightly religious in  living his worldly life. We can say as if the protagonist, named Fahri, is a true mirror of Muhammad. All his thoughts, moves, and all reflect those of Muhammad’s.

Well, it is a good way of promoting Islam actually, if only someone would volunteer to translate it into English.

From this post on (to about several posts), I’ll be talking about this book, its strengths, its weaknesses, its too-romantic points and too-saintal parts and all…

So, please be prepared, okey?

I just finished reading another Tolstoy. It’s The Raids. This short story is, again, inspired by Tolstoy’s life when he joined his brother in the front with soldiers in the province of Don Cossack, in a war with enemy Tartars.

In my opinion, this story is the most beautiful of Tolstoy’s first works, in terms of language. It is true that the story tells about wartime. Yes. But, telling about war doesn’t necessarily mean that a work is unbeautiful (:D). The Raids is beautiful in terms of its description of the landscape, the chain of snowy mountains, the crimson color of dusk, the violet mist surrounding the snowy mountains also in the dusk, and all. I believe it’s because Tolstoy had just seen such panorama there in the region.

Besides description of nature, I also find that it has a very good description of people. Here Tolstoy describes Captain Khlopov’s facial expression and how the I analyzes the characteristic of the Captain.

However, there’s one thing that, in my opinion, needs improvement, that is, its size. I don’t feel comfortable reading Tolstoy when it is very short. Yeah, Tolstoy is served best when it is long, comprehensive, and effectual!!!!!

China is quite famous for its progresses in economy as well as technology. She has assaulted malls all over the world with its “made in china”-labeled products. In the case of Indonesia, you can easily find “made in china” products ranging from cameras, laptops, and kids’ toys to the cheap (and later found containing malicious food additives) candies and snacks. In general, China is famous for its cheap, mass production and market presence all over the world.

However, China is China. Years roll and the globalization has forced the world to be more open. And China is quite accessible now. I say ‘quite’ because there are still some regions in China that are untouchable, that are inaccessible by outsiders. Among the regions is the Province of Anhui. And this book by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntau (entitled Will the Boat Sink the Water?) Continue reading »

Nagabonar (Jadi) 2 or Nagabonar (becomes) 2. It’s a unique sort of sequel naming. It brought to my mind the smartness of such titles as Too Fast and Too Furious (which plays the sound /tu:/ meant to mean “too” with the fact that it is the sequel or the “two-th” (2nd) movie to Fast and Furious) or Unforgiven II (which, again, uses the play of the sound /tu:/ of the word ‘too,’ meaning ‘also,’ and ‘two’). Well, I hope you don’t find it confusing. Essentially, this kind of naming is cool.

Anyway, in this very dream, I’d like to talk about some issues concerning the novel version of Nagabonar (Jadi) 2 (henceforth, NJ2). I think I need to talk first about Nagabonar itself, the movie as well as the character. Nagabonar is one of few greatest movies in the history of Indonesian movies. It was published in 1987, starred by Mr. Deddy Mizwar (a senior Indonesian actor), scriptwritten by the late Mr. Asrul Sani (an author, movie director, and cultural thinker). The first movie made headlines and took Deddy Mizwar to win Citra Award (a prestigious movie award) somewhere around 1987 or 1988. Almost all adults (who live in cities or have access to TV networks) Continue reading »

Alright, brothers and sisters anywhere on Earth, listen up. I’ve got something to say here. I’ll play scholar now. Hehehe…And you, you and you, the shy one, please be nice. If you wanna go to the john, I’ll give you a minute. Okey then if you’re all ready. Lo and behold!

I just read a cool book by Dr. DJoko Saryono. This guy is a Doctor in Indonesian literature in the State University of Malang. The book is Pergulatan Estetika dalam Sastra Indonesia (or, let’s say, Twists and Turns in the Esthetics of Indonesian Literature). It could be that you, who live in Euro-austro-merican countries, have no ideas about how unique Indonesian people were in the past. I bet you don’t.

Look, Indonesian people were categorized as the so-termed ‘Oral Society’. By this term, Djoko wants to say that Indonesian people–or, archipelagic people, since the name Indonesia was not used until around the second decade of the twentieth century, hehehe…–lived with sense of literature kept alert in their mind. They were closely related with literature. In that age, the kind of literature which was pervasive was oral literature. People knew shadow puppet–the stories of which were commonly only written in the head of its puppeters–or parikan–a kind of poetry created, uttered, and modified by rural communities. Both kinds of literature, along with several other kinds, were created by some people, and then uttered by firsthand Continue reading »