Eka Kurniawan

Beauty is a Wound

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A colour-drenched epic, filled with vivid sex and violence, from Indonesia's most exciting young author
The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humour, 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.
Eka Kurniawan was born in Tasikmalaya, Indonesia in 1975. He studied philosophy at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta and has since published several novels and short stories. The rights to Beauty is a Wound have now been sold in 27 territories. Love and Vengeance will be published by Pushkin Press in 2017.
This book is currently unavailable
549 printed pages
Copyright owner
Bookwire
Original publication
2016
Publication year
2016
Publisher
Pushkin Press
Translator
Annie Tucker
Have you already read it? How did you like it?
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Impressions

  • Marina Zalashared an impression7 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    🙈Lost On Me
    💡Learnt A Lot
    💞Loved Up
    🚀Unputdownable

    One of my favorite works! I love how he mixed up history and surrealism indeed! 😍😍

  • olgaprudnshared an impression6 years ago
    👍Worth reading
    💀Spooky
    🔮Hidden Depths

Quotes

  • Marianna Kouzminskayahas quoted6 years ago
    “Believe me, not many people are prepared to remember anything that isn’t their immediate concern.”
  • Marianna Kouzminskayahas quoted6 years ago
    “Well, you are free to love me,” said Dewi Ayu. “But don’t expect too much in return, because expectation has nothing to do with love.”
  • olgaprudnhas quoted6 years ago
    “What am I being arrested for?” asked Comrade Kliwon.
    “Waiting for newspapers that will never come,” said Shodancho, with bitter humor

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