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Book Cover for: Beauty Is a Wound, Eka Kurniawan

Beauty Is a Wound

Eka Kurniawan

Paperback
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Reader Score

82%

82% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 4 reviews on

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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.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Publish Date: Sep 8th, 2015
  • Pages: 384
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.80in - 5.40in - 1.30in - 1.15lb
  • EAN: 9780811223638
  • Categories: • Literary• Family Life - General• Magical Realism

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About the Author

Kurniawan, Eka: - 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.
Tucker, Annie: - Annie Tucker won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Award for her Eka Kurniawan translation.

More books by Eka Kurniawan

Book Cover for: Man Tiger, Eka Kurniawan
Book Cover for: Kitchen Curse: Stories, Eka Kurniawan
Book Cover for: Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, Eka Kurniawan
Book Cover for: La Belleza Es Una Herida /Beauty Is a Wound, Eka Kurniawan

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Sayantika
Sayantika
@Sayantikatweets
1 year

Writer. Love literature, history, rain, redwoods, fog, chalkboards, sprinklers and lawns. Feminist. @usfmfa @CWPUGA

On page 82 of 470 of Beauty Is a Wound, by Eka Kurniawan https://t.co/oNuWtzHvyZ

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Mentioner image for: Andrew F. Sullivan
Andrew F. Sullivan
@AFSulli
2 years

brutalist. The Marigold (@ECWPress) and The Handyman Method (w Nick Cutter @GalleryBooks) One vile task after another. https://t.co/xFK5X1LS9b

Eka Kurniawan's BEAUTY IS A WOUND coils surrealism and satire around a brutal depiction of colonialism and chaos following independence, viciously alive and charmingly aloof at times. I finished it off in a sitting - a stack of tragedies held together by pitch black humour. https://t.co/Thi7ZljRul

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Mentioner image for: Ryan
Ryan
@morbid_swither
2 years

just building my ark like the rest of us. obsessions too many to list. books. music. animals. art. aesthetics. Amarillo, Abilene, Austin.

And : tbh, Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan.

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Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

Very striking.--Tariq Ali
Eka's approach in Beauty... mixes seriousness with irreverence, juxtaposing historical fact and magical realism in a manner reminiscent of Salman Rushdie.--Clarissa Oon "ArtReview Asia"
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.-- "Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)"
Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be South-East Asia's most ambitious writer in a generation.-- "The Economist"
An epic picaresque that's equal parts Canterbury Tales and Mahabharata--exuberantly excessive and captivating. Huge ambition, abundantly realized.-- "Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)"
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 "The New Left Review"
A vivacious translation of a comic but emotionally powerful Indonesian novel.-- "PEN America"
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.-- "Sydney Morning Herald"
As translated by Annie Tucker, Kurniawan's prose is lucid and occasionally lyrical but never showy.--Anthony Domestico "SF Chronicle"
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 "The New York Times"
Both Man Tiger and Beauty Is a Wound constitute a retort from the present to the dark times, while also acknowledging that the dark times may not yet be over. Against the killings of those years and the collective amnesia used to blank out the fate of the victims--a kind of second death, as it were--Kurniawan's fiction summons its legions of ghosts.--Siddhartha Deb "The New Republic"
Gracefully translated by Annie Tucker, the writing is evocative and muscular, with particularly spicy descriptions and some good wry humor.--Sarah Lyall "The New York Times"
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 "Brooklyn Magazine"
An arresting portrait of Indonesia's struggle for nationhood, delights in obscenity: no topic is spared from its bloodthirsty brand of satire.--Gillian Terzis "The New Yorker"
Refreshingly, Kurniawan puts value on literature as entertainment, and his books are certainly that.--Deborah Smith "The Guardian"

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