Surabaya is the setting of Emmanuel Carrère’s narrator’s first sustained adventure abroad and the place where he wrote his first novel. An industrial port at the eastern tip of Java, it brings together the routines of his Peace Corps teaching post, the unsettling history of the French Cultural Center’s manor, and the experiences he later turned into fiction.

Setting and the French Cultural Center

After graduating, the narrator faced mandatory military service. For young urban sophisticates who did not want to become soldiers or reserve officer cadets, he describes two alternatives: being declared unfit for service or working overseas with the French Peace Corps. He chose the latter and was sent to teach at the French Cultural Center in Surabaya.

The center occupied a beautiful Dutch manor whose past shadowed its present. During the Japanese occupation, it had served as an operations headquarters; enough horrible things had happened there for the building to acquire a reputation as haunted. An exorcist came twice a year, and the staff had endless trouble hiring caretakers. Against that troubling history, the garden seemed enchanting: the workplace held both an atmosphere of unease and a setting the narrator remembered as beautiful.

Teaching and Daily Routine

The narrator taught French to well-off Chinese women whose children had grown up and who were a little bored. For them, the classes were a tasteful pastime, comparable to playing bridge. Their lessons included translating Vogue articles about Catherine Deneuve and Yves Saint Laurent. The work thus gave his overseas posting a composed, almost genteel routine, far removed from the military service he had avoided.

Muriel, Travel, and the First Novel

Muriel soon joined him in Surabaya. The two took long trips on his motorbike, drawn to the crowds and smells of Asia. During their time in the city, he wrote his first novel, inspired by their experiences with magic mushrooms. Surabaya therefore marks not only the location of his teaching job but also the beginning of his practice of converting travel and experience into literary material.

He places that book within a recurring literary pattern: the Peace Corps worker’s first novel. Each fall, he says, three or four such books appeared, written by young men from good families who had vaguely dreamed of literature and found themselves for a couple of years in places such as Brazil, Malaysia, or Zaire, far from family and friends. They took themselves for adventurers and told their stories with embellishment. The narrator acknowledges that he embellished his own story a great deal, making Surabaya the starting point of a self-conscious narrative of overseas adventure as well as a real place of work and travel.