Praise
The ingredients of good storytelling—a sharp sense of humor, subtlety, and social critique—all appear organic in People from Oetimu. The writer deftly and accurately depicts the culture and everyday lives of people in Timor.
— Judges of the 2018 Jakarta Arts Council’s best book of the year award
For a novel engaged with the tangled postcolonial history of the island of Timor—and with how myths are made—People from Oetimu is remarkably direct. In a vigorous, no-nonsense style, Felix Nesi delivers horror, violence, and absurdity in equal measure and with intimate immediacy. Once it is all sprinkled with that wry black humor, you end up with a definite page-turner.
— Angel Igov
The book clearly stands out for its satirical wit, cyclical structure, and cohesive navigation of myriad perspectives. However, also remarkable is the way in which Nesi—himself originally from Timor—depicts the province of East Nusa Tenggara, a peripheral region that is seldom represented in Indonesian literature. His is a humorous yet fully heartfelt depiction of life in the context of pervasive violence in Timor.
— Asymptote
Nesi seamlessly weaves the lives of his characters together, and he succeeds at providing complex historical context to the culminating scene . . . The result is a potent and shocking tale of postcolonial depravity
— Publishers Weekly
The residents of Timor struggle with the legacy of their colonial past. In the opening scene, male residents of the town of Oetimu on the island of Timor, formerly a colony of both the Netherlands and Portugal, gather to watch the finals of the 1998 World Cup. As they grumble over Brazil’s unexpected defeat by France, they’re unaware that a murderous gang holds the wife and children of one of the town’s most prominent residents hostage, awaiting his return.
— Kirkus Reviews
[Nesi] summarizes the complex historical events effortlessly . . . Everything is intertwined . . . Hypnotizing.
— Nanda Nabilla Hamzah, book blogger
Controversial, wry, and insanely readable, Felix K. Nesi's People from Oetimu made him an overnight sensation. Hailing from the war-ravaged island of Timor, the novel recounts the misadventures of a town torn apart by corruption, blind ambition, and violence as told through the myopic eyes of its inhabitants. But don't let the serious subject matter fool you. Nesi laces his book with black humor and satire, treating its subject and cast of misfits with as much disdain as sympathy. In his dark little corner of the world, no one is truly innocent, yet neither are they truly at fault. The truth lies somewhere in the grey zone, and you have to push more than you thought possible to get there.
— Raka Ibrahim, The Jakarta Post
An extraordinary novel. Told through dark humor, it is a story of conflict and the depravity of war in East Timor, of sex and sopi, of religion and the state . . . Reading this book makes me all the more convinced that historians are nothing more than failed novelists.
— Andi Achdian, Professor of Indonesian Political History, Universitas Nasional
A page turner, People from Oetimu is so, so good.
— Leila S. Chudori, author of Home
A spirited and moving takedown of colonialisms Portuguese, Japanese, and Indonesian, this novel from East Timor reinvents political literature for the 21st century.
— Siddhartha Deb
The center of Nesi’s wide-ranging debut novel is a police station on the border between East and West Timor, where a group of men have gathered to watch the final of the 1998 World Cup while a political insurgency stirs without. Nesi, in English translation here for the first time, circles this moment broadly, reaching back to the various colonialist projects that have shaped Timor and the lives of his characters
— Jonathan Frey, The Millions
