About the author:
Felix K. Nesi was born in 1988 in Nesam-Insana, a village located in the western part of the island of Timor, which is part of the southernmost province of Indonesia's East Nusa-Tenggara (or East Lesser Sunda Islands). After attending high school he studied at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Malang Merdeka (Java).
Felix Nesi writes poetry, short stories and essays. As part of the Makassar International Writers Festival (MWIF) 2015, he was honored as "Emerging Writer".
Felix K. Nesi is a co-founder of Komunitas Leko (2017), a literacy community, and of the Buku Fanu bookstore in Kupang, Timor.

About the book:
Publisher: CV Marjin Kiri, Indonesien
220 pages
ISBN: 978-979-1260-89-3
Original language: Indonesian

In 2018, the manuscript of the novel Orang-Orang Oetimu won the annual Jakarta Arts Council Novel Competition as Best Novel of the Year. The novel was nominated in the category „prose“ for Indonesia's most prestigious literary award, Kusala Sastra Khatulistiwa, in 2021.
Also in 2021, Orang-Orang Oetimu was awarded the Literature Prize of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Science and Technology of the Republic of Indonesia in the novel category. 

An ethnographical, political and historical novel that is fun to read
The novel is set in Oetimu, a fictional village located in the inland of West Timor.
The history of West Timor, home of Felix Nesis, is inextricably intertwined with the history of Timor-Leste.
After the Carnation Revolution in Portugal in 1974, East Timor was to be decolonized after more than 400 years of Portuguese rule and was supposed to gain independence in 1975. During the decolonization phase, a civil war broke out and East Timor was occupied by Indonesia in 1975. An estimated 130 to 180,000 people lost their lives during the Indonesian occupation from 1975 to 1999. At the independence referendum in East Timor on August 30, 1999, the overwhelming majority of the population voted for full independence. The Indonesian military and pro-Indonesian militias then carried out a punitive action in which 1200 to 1500 people were killed and 70% of the population were displaced, houses and infrastructure were destroyed. This was followed by the deployment of the multinational peacekeeping force INTERFET. The United Nations maintained an interim administration that granted Timor-Leste independence on May 20, 2002, following the referendum result.

Felix Nesis' novel spans a time frame from 1974 to 1998. The story begins on the evening of the 1998 World Cup final. Oetimu's male population is gripped by football fever and the young village policeman Ipi invites them to watch the game together at the police station. At the same time, a killer squad attacks the house and wife and children of Martin Kabiti, a former officer in the Indonesian army and one of the football fanatics at Ipi's office.
The second chapter catapults the reader to 1974 and Lisbon. The temporally and geographically other end of the novel. Based on the story of Julio and his family, Nesi draws the beginning of Timor's decolonization process.

In flashbacks and flashforwards Nesi draws the biographies and fates of his characters against the background of the violant history of Timor, until the reader finally returns to the evening of the World Cup final and the murderous attack with which the book begins. This completes the cyclical narrative structure that reflects the cycles of violence in Timor and Indonesia.
Through the biographies of some of the characters, the reader touches on the Japanese occupation during World War II, the struggle for the country's independence, Suharto's takeover of power in 1965, the massacres of leftists, especially in 1965 and 1966, and the bloody battles and massacres in Timor .

The way in which Felix Nesi brings together numerous narrative threads within the cyclical plot framework over two and a half decades is remarkable. He uses elements of the oral tradition and storytelling of Timor. Many loose plot strands are woven together, some open-ended, elements of magical realism are almost casually incorporated by the author.
The novel is bursting with satirical wit, subtle humor and sometimes comedic interludes. At many points, Nesis' narration inevitably makes the reader laugh. Extremely imaginative story. Nesi is able to merge the juxtaposition of comic scenes and violent events in a literary astonishingly light-footed way.
Nesi brings a fresh literary voice to postcolonial debates.
A grandiose story about the interdependence of politics and church, which takes place far from the main island of Java and the center of power Jakarta, and which takes a fresh look at the interdependencies of local life with national and international interests and lets them appear in a new light.

Translator Sabine Müller presented the book in our pitching session on 3 March 2022.

For further information please contact:

Sabine Müller
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E-Mail: [email protected]
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