Beauty Is a Wound
Sep 2015 · New Directions Publishing
4.7star
9 reviewsreport
Ebook
384
Pages
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About this ebook
The English-language debut of Indonesia's rising star. 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.
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.
Ratings and reviews
4.7
9 reviews
Hotma Bayu
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January 12, 2018
The story is so beautiful with so much Indonesian culture, heritage and even politic in it let alone the witty plot that was written very thorough and detail from the beginning until the end. So beautiful it hurts, just like its title.
1 person found this review helpful
Teddy Feby
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July 28, 2017
Spent almost 2 week read it and worth it🙏👏
About the author
The internationally acclaimed author of Beauty Is a Wound and Man Tiger, Eka Kurniawan was born in West Java in 1975, the day that the little ex-Portuguese colony East Timor declared its sovereign independence.
Annie Tucker won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award for her Eka Kurniawan translation.
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