Kurniawan’s use of the bildungsroman to critique religious individualism might seem counterintuitive: is it not, after all, the narrative form of individualization par excellence? But we must remember that some of the most important literary works from postcolonial countries—from José Rizal’s Noli Me Tángere (1887) to Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018)—have been coming-of-age novels.

Scholars such as Pheng Cheah and Caroline Hau have argued that postcolonial writers turn to the form for its allegorical capacity: the growth of the nation as a self-directing organism is paralleled by the development of a healthy and rational individual consciousness, able to resist the sickness of colonialism. Yet Kurniawan is at least a generation removed from the writers these scholars studied: Salman Rushdie, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Jamaica Kincaid, V. S. Naipaul, or even the author to whom he is inevitably compared, Pramoedya Ananta Toer. None of Kurniawan’s protagonists have the ambition to map the social totality the way Minke and his double Pangemanann in Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet (1980–88) do—not because Kurniawan is a lesser writer but because he lives in an age where nationalist slogans like “NKRI Harga Mati” (roughly, “the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia on Pain of Death”) are used, more often than not, to suppress any form of criticism of the state.

Kurniawan turns to the bildungsroman precisely for its failure. Neither religion nor the nation provides a viable form of collective life, but the novel does not want us to look back nostalgically at some idealized picture of a rural childhood.