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Beauty Is a Wound
by Eka Kurniawan, trans. from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker
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"The English-language debut of Indonesia's greatest young novelist, Eka Kurniawan: "without a doubt the most original, imaginatively profound, and elegant writer of fiction in Indonesia today: its brightest and most unexpected meteorite" (Benedict Anderson). One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. So begins Beauty Is a Wound, an epic, sweeping, compulsively readable novel, combining history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. It is also a highly political book. Revolving around the beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters, various plotlines incorporate incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead.…
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"It’s so great. Eka Kurniawan is Indonesia’s greatest living writer, hands down. To me, he’s an essential read for anyone interested in Indonesia. He has this Quentin Tarantino-like aesthetic. Just like Tarantino loves grindhouse movies, Eka Kurniawan loves these wuxia -style Indonesian martial arts novels, as well as pulpy romances. Growing up in a small town in West Java, those were the kinds of books he read and he has a great fondness for them that comes through in his decidedly more literary works. His novels are very entertaining, very violent and also very funny. To me, the texture of daily life in Indonesia was that a lot of stuff was really funny—from the things that politicians would try to get away with, to the social media miasma, and even in the way people regarded their own history when they chose to talk about it. There’s so much funny stuff and day-to-day people have a pretty easy-going sense of humour as well. That doesn’t really come out in most serious, nonfiction books about Indonesia, but does come out with Eka. Novels can carry the flavour of life. “Eka Kurniawan is Indonesia’s greatest living writer, hands down. To me, he’s an essential read for anyone interested in Indonesia” The novel I chose is a multi-generational epic about an Indonesian-Dutch prostitute and her family over almost a century. Characters die and rise from the dead. Fair warning, there is a lot of sexual violence, which may trigger some people, but I do think in the book it makes sense. It shows the continuity of some of the communal dynamics from the early 20th century to now. The idea of ghosts is very powerful in Indonesia. There is a very strong, almost universal, belief in hantu or ghosts. There’s been so much death at periodic intervals in Indonesian history that is suppressed and it’s sometimes only managed, I think, by thinking of ghosts and other supernatural beings. I don’t think it’s necessary per se and it certainly shouldn’t be a roadblock to this very entertaining novel. I think maybe Eka plus Wikipedia would be a good enough combo for any interested reader. If I can cheat here and recommend a film, I would suggest everyone also watch The Act of Killing by Joshua Oppenheimer , the very best documentary about the mass killings that are a central concern of this novel."