Map of the Invisible World

The title comes from a book Din had dreamed of writing, before prejudice stymied his scholarly ambitions. “I was looking into writing a secret history of the Indonesian Islands in the Southeast, everything from Bali eastward. To me those islands were like a lost world where everything remained true and authentic, away from the gaze of foreigners – a kind of invisible world, almost.”

But Aw is primarily referring to the invisible world of memory, specifically those losses that snag in a person’s psyche and fester if not allowed to air. “There are some things that cause you pain, that lodge themselves in your consciousness the way a splinter or piece of shrapnel might embed itself in your flesh; but the human body had a way of dealing with it that could dull the pain so that you didn’t feel it after a while. Your life would continue as usual, and only you would know of this thing that you carried in your body.”

Neither boy, for example, is allowed to mention his brother. Johan’s overindulgent mummy falls apart and the teen winds up apologizing for hurting her if he so much as says Adam’s name. Karl is less histrionic, but also unforthcoming.

With Karl, Adam spent days swimming over reefs and 300-year-old shipwrecks and bicycling the island. Karl is gentle and well-meaning, but the secrets he kept and the harm his selfishness causes are absolutely appalling. A reader will easily agree with the young Margaret, who remarks, “I think that is a really, really bad idea,” when Karl tells her his dream of adopting an Indonesian “alter ego, except better, and happier,” who will live out the idyllic island childhood that was cut short when Karl’s family moved back to Holland when he was 4.

While Johan self-destructs, Adam is rendered passive by his frequent abandonments. He latches on to anyone who offers to take care of him, with sometimes terrifying results. Meanwhile, he struggles to unlock his memories. He’s encouraged by Din, who argues that remembering his past is the only way to reclaim his identity, and in fact, that Indonesia as a whole suffers from a kind of willed amnesia. He compares Adam to a village he once visited, where a generation before Muslim and Christian neighbors had slaughtered one another.

“Everyone walked about in a daze, as if they were daydreaming. It was as if their whole beings were devoted to suppressing their memories,” Din tells Adam. “We all suffer from it one way or another. Erasing memories in this semiconscious way goes on everywhere, on a national scale, with culture – everything. We Asians are very good at it. If there’s a drought that kills hundreds of thousands, or an earthquake, or the government fires on demonstrators – well, we just forget it and move on. It lingers in our psyche but we never let it come to the surface.... When I lived in Europe I saw that Westerners remember everything – they commemorate bad things that happened to them. It was the only thing I liked about the West.”

There are couple of coincidences too many near the end of the novel, and certain characters’ motivations remain ever unclear, but Aw’s haunting writing and his detailed evocation of 1960s Indonesia are both masterly. “Map of the Invisible World” is both exquisitely and subtly rendered.

Yvonne Zipp regularly reviews fiction for the Monitor.

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