'Scandalous, lively, beautiful and dark' Jeff VanderMeer
'Exuberant, funny, crackling with invention' The Times
A colour-drenched, fantasy-tinged epic tale.
One stormswept afternoon, after twenty-one years of being dead, Dewi Ayu rises from her grave to avenge a curse placed on her family. Amidst the orange groves and starfruit trees, her children and grandchildren have been living out lives of madness, incest, murder and heartbreak. They are creatures of breathtaking beauty - all but one of them, whose ugliness is unparalleled.
And Beauty is her name.
Beauty Is a Wound is a bawdy, epic tale of fearsome women and weak-willed men, communist ghosts and chaste princesses. In this satirical portrait of Indonesia's painful past, Kurniawan weaves together history with local legend to spin a fantastical masterpiece in which darkness and light dance hand in hand.
Part of the Pushkin Press Classics series: timeless storytelling by icons of literature, hand-picked from around the globe.
Translated by Annie Tucker
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. Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is also available from Pushkin Press.
About the Author :
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. Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is also available from Pushkin Press.
Review :
Exuberant, funny, crackling with energy and invention
Annie Tucker's skilful translation captures Kurniawan's matter-of-fact prose and black humour. Elements of the supernatural and oral storytelling combine powerfully to evoke a brutal past and some of the pivotal events that helped shape Indonesia today
Magical realism to rival that of Gabriel García Márquez
An unforgettable, all-encompassing epic... This is an astounding, momentous book
An epic picaresque that's equal parts Canterbury Tales and Mahabharata... exuberantly excessive and captivating. Huge ambition, abundantly realized
Kurniawan's story of an undead woman had morphed into the story of modern Indonesia, an epic novel critics are more wont to compare to One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Canterbury Tales
It's an astonishing, polyphonic epic, a melange of satire, grotesquerie, and allegory that incorporates everything from world history to local folk talks
The final wonder of Beauty Is a Wound is how much pure liveliness and joy there is mixed up with the pain, as if the verdancy of the author's imagination was racing to cover a million corpses with fresh green tendrils
Kurniawan is a brilliant writer, creating fascinating images and characters, spinning wild and magical tales
It felt like a breath of fresh air. It was an enjoyable read and rather amazing
A literary child of Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie
Scatological, scandalous, lively, beautiful and dark and messed up and fantastical. It's like One Hundred Years of Solitude kicked into another gear, with almost a punk sensibility housed within gorgeous writing-and stories coiled within stories within stories. One of the most brilliant things about the novel is how Kurniawan never loses the thread even when spinning so many tales at once
A howling masterpiece
A Southeast Asian storyteller with a magnificent and effortless grasp of his material
Original and powerful... Maybe, who knows, the judges of the Nobel Prize could, in a few years, consider giving [Eka] the prize that Indonesia has never received
A masterpiece... As invigorating, passionate and exhilarating as One Hundred Years of Solitude
The best book I read last year... A blistering critique of Indonesia's bloody past, lightly and variously veiled as a horror story, a farce, a romance, and a B-movie sex romp - but shot through, too, with a strangely touching, light-hearted compassion
A glorious melange of comic grotesquery, romance and political satire
Without a doubt the most original, imaginatively profound, and elegant writer of fiction in Indonesia today
Lush and picaresque... a master novelist not to be missed
The richness of Kurniawan's storytelling will leave you chuckling and amazed, begging for more
