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by Eka Kurniawan (Author), Annie Tucker (translator)
Drawing on folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope, Kurniawan's distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.
The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan's gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation's troubled past:the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million "Communists," followed by three decades of Suharto's despotic rule.
Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years ... Drawing on local sources - folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope - and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan's distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.
BookBrowse Review
I have to admit this book was a struggle. Perhaps the problem is cultural; I don't know enough about the recent history of Indonesia to put the story in context, and the style of writing is a challenge (more like a fable, crude, cartoon violence with little character development) I just couldn't get into it and sadly did not enjoy it. But for those familiar with Indonesian literature, I suspect this will soon take on the status of a classic, read and discussed for many years.
Other Reviews
"Starred Review. Upon finishing the book, the reader will have the sense of encountering not just the history of Indonesia but its soul and spirit. This is an astounding, momentous book." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Anglophone readers are lucky to have access to this exuberantly excessive and captivating novel. Huge ambition, abundantly realized." - Kirkus
"Very striking." - Tariq Ali
"Without a doubt the most original, imaginatively profound, and elegant writer of fiction in Indonesia today: its brightest and most unexpected meteorite. Pramoedya Ananta Toer has found a successor." - The New Left Review
"A vivacious translation of a comic but emotionally powerful Indonesian novel." - PEN America
This information about Beauty Is a Wound was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Born in 1975, the author of novels, short stories, essays, movie scripts, and graphic novels Eka Kurniawan has been described as "one of the few influential writers in Indonesia." - The Jakarta Post.
Annie Tucker is a recipient of a 2013 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award
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