Indonesia is where the narrator’s overseas service becomes an experiment in writing, romance, and self-invention. In Surabaya, on the eastern tip of Java, he teaches French and writes his first novel; in Bali, he and Muriel pursue the life of Western expatriates on the beach. Their time there ends not in the promised freedom of an adventurer’s life but in separation, leaving the narrator to return to Paris with the manuscript and the unsold remains of their venture.

Surabaya and the Peace Corps

After graduating, the narrator chooses overseas service with the French Peace Corps rather than military service or reserve-officer training. He is sent to teach at the French Cultural Center in Surabaya, an industrial port whose literary associations include Joseph Conrad’s novel Victory and the song Surabaya Johnny, composed by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. The center occupies a beautiful Dutch manor that had served as a Japanese operations headquarters during World War II. Horrific events there have given the building a reputation for being haunted; an exorcist visits twice a year, and the staff have trouble finding caretakers. Against this history, its garden is described as enchanting.

The narrator’s students are well-off Chinese women whose children have grown up and who take French lessons as a genteel pastime. Their classes translate articles from Vogue about Catherine Deneuve and Yves Saint Laurent. This work gives the Surabaya episode a modest daily rhythm, while the narrator’s account also frames the city as a place of literary and historical associations, from its European cultural references to the manor’s successive wartime uses.

Muriel, travel, and writing

Muriel joins the narrator in Surabaya. The two travel for long stretches on his motorbike, and their time in Indonesia becomes a shared adventure. Surabaya is also where he writes his first novel, inspired by their experiences with magic mushrooms. He places the book within what he calls a recurring Peace Corps-worker genre: a young man from a comfortable family goes abroad for a few years, imagines himself an adventurer, and turns the experience into a novel, embellishing the story to varying degrees. The observation makes Indonesia not only the setting of the narrator’s early writing but also the material through which he reflects on the conventions and self-dramatization of that writing.

Bali and the imagined expatriate life

On vacation, Muriel and the narrator travel to Bali. They are less drawn to Balinese celebrations, traditional music, and ancestral rites than to the Westerners living in lodges at Kuta Beach and Legian, where their attractions are surfing, magic mushrooms, and torch-lit parties by the water. The narrator sorts this beach society into social ranks: passing tourists, wary backpackers, Australian surfers, and the chic, well-resourced expatriates he and Muriel call the chic babas. They dream of joining the last group, whose members arrive from Goa and rent wooden beach houses for the season.

That aspiration becomes a business plan. After learning that locally made bikinis embroidered with gold thread can be bought for a dollar each, Muriel estimates they could sell for ten times as much in Paris. The couple invest their savings and the allowance due to Peace Corps workers at the end of their service in an order for five thousand bathing suits, to be shipped to France at the French Foreign Ministry’s expense. They imagine the scheme financing a life divided between Paris and Bali, with Bali the preferred home.

Departure and the limits of the adventure

The boxes arrive a month after Muriel has left the narrator for an older, more self-assured expatriate. He returns to Paris alone with the novel manuscript and five thousand bathing suits, which become reminders of the failed relationship and, in his estimation, of his life as a whole. The contrast fixes Indonesia’s significance in the narrative: Surabaya and Bali had seemed to offer artistic possibility, erotic happiness, and an adventurous future, but the return exposes how much of that future depended on a fragile romance and an untested commercial hope. The narrator’s later account of Indonesia is therefore both a record of places where he lived and worked and the opening of a story about ambitions that did not survive their passage back to Paris.