Beauty Is a Wound
Eka Kurniawan
(Author)
Annie Tucker
(Translator)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
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.
Product Details
Price
$20.95
$19.48
Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publish Date
September 08, 2015
Pages
384
Dimensions
5.4 X 7.8 X 1.3 inches | 1.15 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780811223638
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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.
Reviews
Gracefully translated by Annie Tucker, the writing is evocative and muscular, with particularly spicy descriptions and some good wry humor.--Sarah Lyall
Very striking.--Tariq Ali
A vivacious translation of a comic but emotionally powerful Indonesian novel.
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.--Benedict Anderson
Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be South-East Asia's most ambitious writer in a generation.
Refreshingly, Kurniawan puts value on literature as entertainment, and his books are certainly that.--Deborah Smith
As translated by Annie Tucker, Kurniawan's prose is lucid and occasionally lyrical but never showy.--Anthony Domestico
An arresting portrait of Indonesia's struggle for nationhood, delights in obscenity: no topic is spared from its bloodthirsty brand of satire.--Gillian Terzis
An unforgettable, all-encompassing epic... 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.
An epic picaresque that's equal parts Canterbury Tales and Mahabharata--exuberantly excessive and captivating. Huge ambition, abundantly realized.
It's an astonishing, polyphonic epic, a melange of satire, grotesquerie, and allegory that incorporates everything from world history to local folk talks.--Phillip Pantuso
Kurniawan does not merely traffic skillfully in magic realism; his Halimunda -- like García Márquez's Macondo and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County -- lets him show how the currents of history catch, whirl, carry away and sometimes drown people.--John Fasman
Very striking.--Tariq Ali
A vivacious translation of a comic but emotionally powerful Indonesian novel.
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.--Benedict Anderson
Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be South-East Asia's most ambitious writer in a generation.
Refreshingly, Kurniawan puts value on literature as entertainment, and his books are certainly that.--Deborah Smith
As translated by Annie Tucker, Kurniawan's prose is lucid and occasionally lyrical but never showy.--Anthony Domestico
An arresting portrait of Indonesia's struggle for nationhood, delights in obscenity: no topic is spared from its bloodthirsty brand of satire.--Gillian Terzis
An unforgettable, all-encompassing epic... 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.
An epic picaresque that's equal parts Canterbury Tales and Mahabharata--exuberantly excessive and captivating. Huge ambition, abundantly realized.
It's an astonishing, polyphonic epic, a melange of satire, grotesquerie, and allegory that incorporates everything from world history to local folk talks.--Phillip Pantuso
Kurniawan does not merely traffic skillfully in magic realism; his Halimunda -- like García Márquez's Macondo and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County -- lets him show how the currents of history catch, whirl, carry away and sometimes drown people.--John Fasman
