Saman is a story filtered through the lives of its feisty female protagonists and the enigmatic “hero” Saman. It is at once an exposé of the oppression of plantation workers in South Sumatra, a lyrical quest to understand the place of religion and spirituality in contemporary lives, a playful exploration of female sexuality and a story about love in all its guises, while touching on all of Indonesia's taboos: extramarital sex, political repression and the relationship between Christians and Muslims. Saman has taken the Indonesian literary world by storm, and is now available for the first time in English.
“Ayu Utami is a groundbreaking novelist, whose Saman (1998) is credited with ushering in a sea of change in the nation’s storytelling by daring to deal with sex and politics in a way that was previously off-limits for female authors. This shift is known as sastra wangi. with some people at the time anecdotally referring to the women writers in the movement as the ‘cliterati’.” —Ann Morgan
(A special thank you to book club members, Eydis West & Beth Cummings for the suggestion.)