Evocative of Carver, particularly his dark melancholy college towns full of despondent and pathetic characters unaware of their own inhumanity. Budi Darma isn’t overly familiar to most American readers, but he should be, in the same way that Haruki Murakami is. His prose is terse yet firm and doesn’t distract from those characters as they either evolve or fail to evolve, and part of the darkness Darma paints is in the utter realism of the situations, despite the sometimes seemingly random pathology they exhibit. Although Darma himself points out that the theme of his stories is in the humanity explored, and thus that these could as easily be set in Paris or Dublin as Bloomington, I used to live in Indiana and could recognize it at times from his descriptions, especially the way he was able to often capture the state’s gloomy flatness and climate. At times he’s heavy handed with his literary references, but it may just seem that way from reading the collection straight through, instead of each story on its own as it might appear in a literary magazine or anthology. Not heavy handed at all, and in fact quite deft, is the way Darma at times seems to channel the voices of particular authors he admires. In addition to Carver, there’s the pathological enmity of Faulkner in Barn Burning and Sound & Fury, and the lucid insanity of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman. I didn’t pick up much Austen (one of his self-ascribed favorites) but at times it felt like Darma lightly mocked the social scenes that Austen too sometimes mocked, though in a different way and for different reasons.

Bottomline, this is a very solid collection of short fiction. Some of the stories are very strongly similar in theme and plot points (lots of hospital visits, lots of car accidents occurring to people the protagonist doesnt like, lots of lonely young men creepily inserting themselves into the lives of complete strangers) to the point that some feel repetitive, but there really isn’t a bad story in the bunch.

What a strange collection of short stories. Even though there are only seven stories, they seem to be connected to one another. Unreliable narrators harassing old/weak people seem to be the main theme of the stories. Many absurd unpleasant things happen to the characters.