Night of a Thousand Hells: a subversive, shapeshifting tale of sisterhood, violence and grief |
Making the longlist this week for the US National Book Award for translated literature, Intan Paramaditha’s Night of a Thousand Hells is a subversive, shape-shifting novel in which family tragedy becomes political reckoning, horror exposes social violence, and familiar stories turn sinister.
Set in Indonesia, the novel opens in the aftermath of a suicide bombing by a radical group targeting places of worship and community groups. Annisa, a young mother and the youngest of three sisters, is dead, leaving her sisters, Muti and Maya, to confront the question that drives the novel: what led Annisa to get on a motorbike with a bomb strapped to her chest and why did she join this radical group intent on killing innocent men, women and children?
The search for answers to these questions takes the sisters into a world where myth and history, the living and the dead, and innocence and culpability are never easily separated.
Paramaditha’s achievement lies in the way she brings Indonesian folklore, Islamic mysticism and contemporary political violence into conversation with the ghostly legacies of western literature. Three familiar stories are particularly important: Shakespeare’s King Lear, the fairy tale of Cinderella, and the storytelling tradition of One Thousand and One Nights. These are not simply literary references; they become frameworks through which the novel........