Jazz, Perfume & the Incident, by Seno Gumira Ajidarma, was first published in Indonesian in 1996 and is the first major Indonesian literary work to deal critically with the horror of life under military occupation in East Timor. This novel, which defied Indonesia's regime of censorship, made available, in its pages, the heavily censored reality that journalists dared not report. In this novel, the author combines the surreal and the actual in a way that forever changed Indonesian literature and political discourse. Call it fact or call it fiction, Jazz, Perfume & the Incident offers a penetrating look at both Indonesian officialdom and the desires of young Indonesians.
