Jakarta
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this hallucinatory novel of ruin and reconstruction, a man and his lover search for closure while a virulent plague hastens disaster in the world around them.
In a chaotic city, the latest in a line of viruses advances as a man recounts the fated steps that led him to be confined in a room with his lover while catastrophe looms. As he takes inventory of the city’s ills, a strange stone distorts reality, offering brief glimpses of the deserted territories of his memory. A sports game that beguiles the city with near-religious significance, the hugely popular gambling systems rigged by the Department of Chaos and Gaming, an upbringing in schools that disappeared classmates even if the plagues didn’t—everything holds significance and nothing gives answers in the vision realm of his own making.
The turbulent and sweeping world of Jakarta erupts with engrossing new dystopias and magnetic prose to provide a portrait of a fallen society that exudes both rage and resignation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
M rquez Tizano's debut is a feverishly depicted panorama of a city laid low by a series of surreal events and misfortunes. An unnamed narrator and his partner rarely leave the room they share as their illness-ravaged city teeters on the brink of disaster outside, its citizens enlivened only by a vast gambling network centered on a near-sacred sport. As some new horror approaches, the narrator chronicles his childhood teachers and their bizarre lessons, his life as a former hazmat worker during the peak of the "Z-bug" epidemic, and later as a refugee in a series of underground tunnels meant to prevent the spread of the virus. As he recalls these strange, apocalyptic experiences, he describes a unique cast of characters, including his prophetic, prolific friend Morgan, whose journals seem to be sending messages to the narrator, and his partner Clara, who has discovered a strange stone that may or may not be granting her visions of the past. Lacking a clear or typical trajectory, this short novel is dense with imagery and boundless imagination, creating a vividly grotesque reality for those who exist within its society: the disillusioned gamblers, the cleanup crews, the bureaucrats, and the Z-bug's dead. Blending the wildly dystopian with the mundanity of the everyday, this time-jumping narrative is a bolt of originality from a writer to watch.
