Novel
Saga
Not translated into English
Abdul Talib Mohd Hassan · 1976
Synopsis
Rahmat returns to his native village, Batu Ragi, a remote village, with his wife Munirah and his friend Hisyam. The three educated young people have left the comfort of the city to lift the village out of its backwardness: they build a school, a bridge, a road, but come up against the envy and mistrust of villagers attached to their beliefs and family loyalties. Among the three of them, friendship is compounded by personal tensions.
Context
It is the author's first novel; it was published in 1976. The jury praised the renewal it brought to the Malaysian novel and the psychological accuracy of the characters; the book breaks with third-person narration, the three heroes speaking in turn. A sociolinguistic study at the University of Malaya has examined the notion of shame in Malay culture in it. The author gave it two sequels, in 1993 and in 2001.
Who it is for
A novel of more than three hundred and fifty pages, in Malay; it exists neither in French nor in English.
Prizes and reception
First prize in the novel competition of the national writers' federation in 1976; reissued by Utusan into the two thousands.
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