Twilight in Jakarta

Lubis's angry panorama of Jakarta in the mid-1950s cuts between the classes of the young republic's capital, from the garbage collectors of the kampungs to the corrupt politicians and businessmen growing rich on graft. The real city organises it: the crowded poor quarters around Senen, the leafy elite villas of Menteng, the smuggling docks of Tanjung Priok, the old commercial town of Kota, and the government centre at Merdeka Square where the rot begins.

Saimun

The kampung (Senen)

The poor

Saimun, a migrant from the villages, hauls the city's rubbish and lives hand to mouth in a kampung, one of the countless poor on whose labour and misery the capital runs. Lubis grounds his indictment of the republic's corruption in the daily reality of people like him, who pay for the rich men's graft.

The kampung chapters

inferred The urban poor of the novel live in the crowded kampungs of central Jakarta around Senen, a real district; the specific alleys are sited in that quarter of the working city.

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