The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks

Sato Reang enjoys an idyllic childhood of soccer, fighting crickets, and mischief in his Indonesian village—until the day he must be circumcised, and his observant father forces him into a life of Islamic piety. For years, Sato outwardly obeys his father, but all the while the boy chafes at the strictures of his religious routine, longing for everyday pleasures and vowing to himself that he will “become a child who was not pious.” His freewheeling linked anecdotes—mixing worldliness and naïveté, cruelty and innocence—are narrated with a toggling between first and third person (“I”/“he” or “Sato Reang”) that potently conveys his disassociation. His adolescent, hormone-fueled crotchetiness expresses dissent: I stopped going to mosque. I no longer joined in worship. I never said my prayers before bed. Sato Reang eats with his left hand—so stupid—and barges in where he pleases, without calling out a greeting. If I was feeling lazy, I’d just piss on a banana tree, and I wouldn’t wash myself off after. But amid various mysterious portents and even within the hilarity, Sato’s callow sang froid (with its undercurrents of pain and shame)—and his comic pranks—soon invite tragedy.

A psychologically timeless story—anyone who’s ever had an overbearing parent and resented them will relate—The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks is Eka Kurniawan’s most contemporarily relevant book: he’s thinking about (and rejecting) militancy and moral certitude of any kind.

Author Biography

The internationally acclaimed author of Beauty Is a Wound, Eka Kurniawan was born in West Java in 1975, the day that the little ex-Portuguese colony East Timor declared its sovereign independence. His work has been translated into thirty-five languages and he has been acclaimed the “literary child of Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie” (The New York Review of Books). Le Monde has suggested that in the future, Nobel jurors may award him the prize “that Indonesia has never received.”

Annie Tucker’s translation of Beauty is a Wound was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, longlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award, a 2016 Man Booker International Prize finalist, and the winner of the 2016 World Reader’s Award.