At the Circus: Short fiction

By Nukila Amal (author), Toni Pollard (translator)

She went up onto the stage. Spinning without stopping, round in an invisible circle with no way of knowing where it began or ended. […]She spun faster, faster still until her shadow falling on the floor was incapable of keeping up with her movement. She stopped suddenly. She opened her eyes, for a moment blinded by the bright lights. […]She let the feeling of lightness subside, and left the stage in search of smaller, more humble lights.

From “At the Circus”

Ternate-born Nukila Amal is one of Indonesia’s most innovative and imaginative contemporary writers. Her stories — often hilarious, always moving, occasionally heartbreaking, sometimes shocking, but never ordinary — take you on a journey across the archipelago and into the lives of memorable, but often unnamed characters. A young widow, caught in the midst of sectarian violence, must decide whether to save her unborn baby. A man so traumatized by the loss of his family in the Aceh tsunami can no longer function as the brilliant architect he once was. In “Mannequin,” a man purchases a shop mannequin, gets his servant to dress it up then locks himself in his room with “her,” “Birds Select a King” is about a convocation of birds, including the tiny hummingbird, competing to be crowned king. “Sirajatunda, King of Procrastinators” will have you laughing out loud. One set of brief word pictures, Gazers and Storytellers, ingeniously reimagines visual images of the artist Escher. Another set, Anya and Co, focuses on the creative process of a writer and the source of her inspiration.

Nukila writes in a prose verging on poetry, brimming with metaphor, referencing world literature and art, and playing with language like no other Indonesian writer. At the Circus is a whirlwind in words that will blow you away, or have you spinning like the dancer in the title story.