Telegram

Telegram, Putu Wijaya’s debut novel, is a literary trendsetter in its synthesis of reality and fantasy. Unapologetically disorienting, the text offers a compelling portrait of Jakarta and Bali in the early 1970s. The novel’s first-person narrator is a Balinese journalist living in Jakarta who receives a telegram informing him that his mother is ill. But nothing is as it seems in Telegram. As readers are brought into the stream of consciousness meanderings of this sympathetic yet troubled and unreliable narrator, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what’s real from what isn’t.