The Absurdist Meets Jane Austen in Bloomington

The Nation, April 12, 2022

Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington engages in a strange realism—where life in a small-town America seems both banal and absurd. 

By Intan Paramaditha

EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay originally appeared as the foreword to Budi Darma’s People from Bloomington. 

I first read Budi Darma’s Orang-orang Bloomington (“People from Bloomington”) at a very young age and had little understanding of the book other than that it is a collection of stories about the lives of white people in America. My second and more exciting encounter with Budi Darma happened much later, in my early 30s, when I was writing my novel, The Wandering, about a Third World woman who travels the globe with a pair of cursed red shoes. As I engaged with the themes of global mobility and cosmopolitanism in my novel, I researched Indonesian authors who, like myself, had lived abroad and written stories set outside Indonesia. I was in Amsterdam on a fellowship and decided to pick up a copy of People from Bloomington from the KITLV library in Leiden. It was a strange way to reconnect with Budi Darma and realize that he, too, was a writer in transit. He wrote the book in 1979 when he was a PhD student at a university in the United States, just like I was when I was writing my novel, and he produced some of the Bloomington stories in Europe, en route to Indonesia.

Reading the book as a traveler, I was transported to streets in America’s Midwest, some big and others small, with nice houses and big lawns under a blue sky. Yet, as David Lynch has reminded us, when you see flowers behind white picket fences and “Blue Velvet” plays in your head, you know that you will find a severed ear. Something is lurking beneath the familiar. I recognized the changing seasons, the apartment buildings, and the trees, but I had a feeling that we were not in Kansas, Bloomington, or an unassuming Midwestern city anymore. Budi Darma’s realism is also a strange realm, a universe full of coincidence and cruel fate, where a larger force—deus ex machina?—is laughing at the characters, or at myself, like in the Coen brothers’ films. When I learned that Budi Darma was completing his PhD thesis on Jane Austen when he wrote it, I finally understood his stories, along with his cast of observant but weird characters, in a different light. People from Bloomington is Jane Austen’s world with an absurdist twist. Budi Darma’s new take on the absurd, along with his cosmopolitan sensibility, has added a rich, complex, and vibrant flavor to the history of Indonesian literature.