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The Diary of R.S.: Musings on Art 268 pages Art and memory; polygamy and a 65-year-old woman; pornography and the
life of a prostitute through the eyes of a dwarfish painter; “reality”
seen through the The various forms that make up this collection of short stories—half-dream,
half-parable; dramatic script; half-thriller, half-romance; poem; ironic
commentary; freewheeling meditation, as well as other heartfelt lessons
in seeing—are Laksmi Pamuntjak’s own travel stories in worlds
that open up in that solitary moment of connection she experiences with
a painting. In the
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urban cinematic psychodramas of contemporary or near-contemporary Jakarta
which Pamuntjak creates draw on multiple cultural and societal referents
and do not pander to cheap exoticism. The stories are impressionistic
and at times densely poetic, but are also healthily obsessed with the
human minutiae of thought, sense, the political and the physical. In terms
of Sanskrit poetics, to properly read these linked tales is to become
a rasik, a lover. There is a sensual efflorescence reminiscent
of the work of Patricia Duncker. These are vignettes: linked, dynamic
portraits of whores, hairdressers, artists, housewives, workers, mothers;
for like Pamuntjak’s characters, reality is chimaeric, brief, intense, past .