Book review: Indonesian novel 24 Hours With Gaspar melds detective fiction and sci-fi 

24 Hours With Gaspar

By Sabda Armandio, translated by Lara Norgaard
Fiction/Seagull Books/184 pages/$27.41 from Amazon SG (

amzn.to/3QLky0i

)
3 stars

A blend of detective fiction and science fiction, 24 Hours With Gaspar reads like an Indonesian pulp fiction novel.

The bulk of Indonesian writer Sabda Armandio’s slim novel follows the indecipherable and aloof Gaspar as he counts down 24 hours before he robs a jewellery store. He is looking, in particular, to lay hands on a black box whose contents remain a mystery throughout the novel.

Gaspar – a self-appointed private investigator – is on the street hunting for collaborators, donning a jacket with an embroidered dragon and riding the city with his sentient motorbike, Cortazar.

He is a figure central to the fictional “crime of March 4th”, which the novel compares to other dates in Indonesian history tied to tragedy, such as the 30th of September Movement, which saw the assassination of six Indonesian Army generals in 1965.

Whether or not Gaspar is supposed to be a stand-in for historical figures behind real-life tragic events is never made clear. But he is no mastermind, often allowing the contingencies of his encounters – and his sentient motorbike – to advance his own plot.

This makes for a somewhat random sequence of events that does not always compel, but can be a fun romp through the idiosyncracies of Indonesian life if one does not care too much about how his robbery plot is unfolding.

Gaspar’s plot is told – to add even more layers of intrigue – through two other devices. For one, the novelist introduces a series of interspersed interview transcripts that recounts the crime and creates an alternative entry point into the heist.

All this is, in fact, told retrospectively by an invented novelist Artur Harahap, who pieces together this story from a humanoid whose “consciousness had been uploaded into a robot body with a tube-shaped head and a torso cluttered with silly refrigerator magnets” and other surreal elements.

With three disparate narrative threads trying to hold these 24 hours together, the novel is not always the most cogent and, in its narration, the book questions the difficulties associated with pursuing historical memory.

Translator Lara Norgaard has rendered this book eminently readable in English, choosing to leave untranslated words with cultural specificity – for instance, the Indonesian word “warung”, a type of small family-owned business or eatery – giving the novel a heightened sense of place.

Quirky illustrations by Radityo Wicaksono are also scattered throughout the book, emphasising the novel’s pulpish quality.

Credit should also go to publisher Seagull Books for bringing out a translation of genre fiction, which is less common in the English-language translation market than historically inflected works such as Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty Is A Wound.

For those in search of more intricately plotted detective fiction, 24 Hours With Gaspar will inevitably be disappointing as the narrative can sometimes be unbearably dense.

But for those looking for a bit of fun and to peer into the unfathomable mind of an oddball character, 24 Hours With Gaspar is a speedy and playful read.

If you like this, read: The Wandering by Intan Paramaditha, translated by Stephen J Epstein (Harvill Secker, 2021, $18.95, Amazon SG, go to

amzn.to/45sg17C

). This novel by an Indonesian writer is a different kind of playful, borrowing the choose-your-own-adventure form to tackle the topic of nomadism.