In many ways, this collection of short stories by Indonesian author Budi Darma is exactly what it says on the can - a book that tells the tale of people living in the Midwest college town of Bloomington, Indiana. The collection is set in the 1970s and each of the stories has a first-person narrator. Each of these narrators has some kind of emotional or mental condition that manifests as social isolation. They are also all rather preoccupied with the other characters i the stories, and spend an unhealthy amount of time watching them from the window, obsessing about them and generally concerning themselves with the lives of others far more than with their own.
Darma is known for writing absurdist fiction, so the disturbed mental state of the stories' protagonists is not entirely surprising. Although the stories are believable they all have a slightly violent undertone, giving the reader the impression that any one of these protagonists is one bad day away from creating actual harm to themselves or to others.
Darma spent six years as a graduate student in Bloomington, and brings real-life places and people into the stories in the collection. Critics have compared the stories to those of Roald Dahl, although the author finds the work to be Kafka-esque. The recipient of the Indonesian Government Arts Award in 1993, he was best known as an essayist, and was also a professor of Literature at the State University of Surabaya. He passed away in 2021.
