Laksmi Pamuntjak
Author
Indonesian author Laksmi Pamuntjak (born 1971) writes novels, short stories, poems and essays in Indonesian and English. She received the LiBeraturpreis 2016 for her first novel "Alle Farben Rot" (Ullstein 2016), which was translated from Indonesian into German. The follow-up novel "Herbstkind" (Ullstein 2018), which she wrote in English, was also published in German. She is best known in her home country for her extremely popular restaurant guide "The Jakarta Good Food Guide", which has been published in several editions since 2001. Pamuntjak's great passion for Indonesian cuisine is also reflected in her novel "The Birdwoman's Palate", a culinary road trip that was made into a film under the name "Aruna & Her Palate" (2018) by Indonesian director Edwin, premiered at the 2019 Berlinale and is currently being shown on Netflix. Laksmi Pamuntjak lives and works in Jakarta.
"The Question of Red"
“They miscalculated, you see,“ Zulfikar said, after a very long silence, his tone grim, almost cruel. “Suharto thought this island would become his communist graveyard. But what we tapols found was a rice trove, a new soil, a new life. Plant almost anything in this Buru soil, even a political prisoner, and it will live.” But his eyes were surprisingly moist, and Amba caught this, too, so much that she had to look away from the view, fearful perhaps of stoking her own grief. On every side of the valley jagged mountains rose from the earth, like a pod of surfacing whales. “Amazing,” she muttered under her breath. “It’s like, like a nod to Nietzsche.” “Who?” Zulfikar said, leaning toward her. “Nietzsche,” Amba repeated softly, “The German philosopher. That brilliant man who went, one day, to climb some mountains in the Alps. He stayed there awhile and wrote words that changed lives. Those mountains wouldn’t have been too different from these, only snow-covered.”
The Question of Red (2014, p. 309)