Research Catalog

Title

Beauty is a wound / Eka Kurniawan ; translated by Annie Tucker.

Author

Kurniawan, Eka, 1975-

Publication

New York : New Directions, 2015.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Tucker, Annie

Description

470 pages; 20 cm

Summary

"The English-language debut of Indonesia's greatest young novelist, Eka Kurniawan: "without a doubt the most original, imaginatively profound, and elegant writer of fiction in Indonesia today: its brightest and most unexpected meteorite" (Benedict Anderson). One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. So begins Beauty Is a Wound, an epic, sweeping, compulsively readable novel, combining history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. It is also a highly political book. Revolving around the beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters, various plotlines incorporate 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," and the three decades of Suharto's despotic rule that followed. The bravura resilience on display here makes Beauty Is a Wound a luscious yet astringent product of the art blossoming since the fall of Suharto. Kurniawan's distinctive West Javanese voice will be entirely new to American readers, and its local sources (the all night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope; the famous local folk tales) will astonish, but Kurniawan draws as well on his favorite world writers, Melville, Gogol, Hamsun, and Marquez"--

Uniform Title

Cantik itu luka. English

Alternative Title

Cantik itu luka.

Subject

• Families > Fiction
• Mothers and daughters > Fiction
• Prostitutes > Fiction
• Speculative fiction
• Indonesia > Fiction
• Indonesia > History > Fiction

Note

• Novel.
• "A New Directions paperbook original."

Call Number

JFD 15-4722

ISBN

• 9780811223638
• 0811223639

LCCN

2015013461

OCLC

906936870

Author

Kurniawan, Eka, 1975- author.

Title

Beauty is a wound / Eka Kurniawan ; translated by Annie Tucker.

Publisher

New York : New Directions, 2015.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Added Author

Tucker, Annie, translator.

Translation of: Kurniawan, Eka, 1975- Cantik itu luka.

Research Call Number

JFD 15-4722