The Dog Meows, The Cat Barks – Eka Kurniawan , Annie Tucker

Growing up in a small Indonesian town, Sato Reang has a happy childhood playing soccer and watching crickets fight. Until the day he is circumcised—and his father declares that he is now ‘a pious boy’. Sato soon learns that a life of piety means a loss of all the everyday pleasures he had once enjoyed, as he wakes at dawn for the first call to prayer, and spends the evening in Quranic recitation. Inwardly chafing, Sato outwardly obeys his father’s strictures—until his father dies.

That is when Sato decides to achieve his ambition of not being pious and embarks on a life of mischief—such as pissing on trucks and crates of fruit —and worse, setting fire to the town’s theatre. He no longer goes to the mosque, or prays five times a day. But he does not rest until he makes Jamal, the most pious boy in school, commit a sin—like watching porn and drinking black beer.

What starts as schoolboy fun ends in tragedy, and raises disturbing questions about teenage rebellion, overbearing parenting, force and freedom.

The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks is Eka Kurniawan’s most contemporarily relevant book, and his quixotic switching from first to third person, makes it a truly unique one. Relentlessly funny and frank, this new novel by Indonesia’s best-known writer is compulsive reading.