“In People from Oetimu . . . we witness colonization, decolonization, annexation, revolution, and . . . the impossibility of narrating a true history of violence, the pitfalls of preferring one language to another, the tension between narratives that emerges when the site of violence and annexation has transformed . . . The reader is forced to contend with the cyclicality of violence—that it is not merely in the past, but a vital driving force like chance in the Victorian novel.” —Munib Khan, Wasafiri
“Felix Nesi, who grew up in West Timor, has described reaching a point where he couldn’t write about anything unrelated to the violence he witnessed in his hometown. The result is a form of literature that . . . asks the reader to think harder about what we’re looking for in those pages . . . A core project of Nesi’s novel . . . is to encourage skepticism of the very concept of the nation.” —Rebecca Hanssens-Reed, Cleveland Review of Books
“For a novel engaged with the tangled postcolonial history of the island of Timor—and with how myths are made—People from Oetimu is remarkably direct. In a vigorous, no-nonsense style, Felix K. Nesi delivers horror, violence, and absurdity in equal measure and with intimate immediacy. Once it is all sprinkled with that wry black humor, you end up with a definite page-turner.”—Angel Igov
“A spirited and moving takedown of colonialisms Portuguese, Japanese, and Indonesian, this novel from East Timor reinvents political literature for the 21st century.”—Siddhartha Deb
“The ingredients of good storytelling—a sharp sense of humor, subtlety, and social critique—all appear organic in People from Oetimu. The writer deftly and accurately depicts the culture and everyday lives of people in Timor.”—Judges of the 2018 Jakarta Arts Council’s best book of the year award
“An extraordinary novel. Told through dark humor, it is a story of conflict and the depravity of war in East Timor, of sex and sopi, of religion and the state . . . Reading this book makes me all the more convinced that historians are nothing more than failed novelists.”—Andi Achdian, Professor of Indonesian Political History, Universitas Nasional
“Controversial, wry, and insanely readable, Felix K. Nesi’s People from Oetimu made him an overnight sensation. Hailing from the war-ravaged island of Timor, the novel recounts the misadventures of a town torn apart by corruption, blind ambition, and violence as told through the myopic eyes of its inhabitants. But don’t let the serious subject matter fool you. Nesi laces his book with black humor and satire, treating its subject and cast of misfits with as much disdain as sympathy. In his dark little corner of the world, no one is truly innocent, yet neither are they truly at fault. The truth lies somewhere in the grey zone, and you have to push more than you thought possible to get there”—Raka Ibrahim, The Jakarta Post
“The center of Nesi’s wide-ranging debut novel is a police station on the border between East and West Timor, where a group of men have gathered to watch the final of the 1998 World Cup while a political insurgency stirs without. Nesi, in English translation here for the first time, circles this moment broadly, reaching back to the various colonialist projects that have shaped Timor and the lives of his characters.”—Jonathan Frey, The Millions Winter 2025 Most Anticipated list
“[Felix Nesi] possesses a subtle, liberating humour that not only makes the terror, the omnipresent violence and the miseries of everyday life [in People from Oetimu] bearable, but also has an almost salutary, even conciliatory character, without ever allowing the criticism of existing misery to degenerate into petty grumbling. It is this that makes Nesi’s novel not only a special, but above all a universal work.” — Axel Timo Purr, Literatur Review
“Nesi’s prose, translated from Indonesian into English by Lara Norgaard, is succinct and polished, matter-of-fact even . . . ‘Vital’ is a good word to describe People From Oetimu. The novel courses with energy and urgency, making it an important event in the world of contemporary political fiction.”—Nate Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor
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