Beauty Is a Wound

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.
Binding Type: Paperback
Contributors: Eka Kurniawan,Annie Tucker (Translator)
Published: 09/08/2015
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
ISBN: 9780811223638
Pages: 384
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 1.30″ H x 7.80″ L x 5.40″ W

About the Author
Kurniawan, Eka: –

The internationally acclaimed author of Beauty Is a Wound, Eka Kurniawan was born in West Java in 1975, the day that the little ex-Portuguese colony East Timor declared its sovereign independence. His work has been translated into thirty-five languages and he has been acclaimed the “literary child of Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie” (The New York Review of Books). Le Monde has suggested that in the future, Nobel jurors may award him the prize “that Indonesia has never received.”

Tucker, Annie: –

Annie Tucker‘s translation of Beauty is a Wound was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, longlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award, a 2016 Man Booker International Prize finalist, and the winner of the 2016 World Reader’s Award.