Beauty Is a Wound (MP3 CD)
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Staff Reviews
Beauty is a Wound opens with a woman twenty years dead clawing her way out of the grave. From there the novel manages to become even more memorable. Written by Indonesia's greatest living writer, this sweeping epic of love, lust, and war is peopled by an unforgettably colorful cast of characters. Kurniawan, who has two novels in translation being published this fall (by different publishers), is worthy of assuming the place left by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He's that good.
— SparksDescription
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 21 years...." Drawing on local sources - folktales 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.