A Cartography of Intricate Initiation: Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World
A Cartography of Intricate Initiation: Tash Aw’s Map of the Invisible World

Summary/Abstract: Tash Aw’s novel “Map of the Invisible World”, first published in English in 2009 and translated into Romanian in 2012 can be arguably labeled as an epistemological interplay between micro and macro-history. Indeed, it yields an autobiography of sorts, a Bildungsroman with a difference. The protagonist’s (Adam’s) meanderings through historical turmoil in Indonesia in the 1960’s may be said to be neatly coterminous with his trauma-laden biography, as the plot per se yields images of both the personal mapping out of coming-of-age on the one hand and of the political destiny of a new nation on the other hand. An implicit hierarchy of contesting epistemologies is equally salient here, as Adam’s initiation into the world of adulthood is riddled with questions of whose worldview, whose Weltanschauung counts? Is it that of his – flawed – filiation (he was adopted in his infancy); or is it that of postcolonial dogma imposition his homeland undergoes?

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