Acclaimed Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan's English-language debut, Beauty Is a Wound, is a profound, strange and often shocking tragicomedy--a multi-generational epic spanning decades of Indonesian history. Moreover, it is a beautifully written melodrama that, through fantastical and fictional characters, tells of the actual harm done by everyone who has ever invaded or colonized Indonesia.
The narrative style is direct and shares many qualities of an oral story. Moments of great distress or sweeping consequence are delivered in a simplified, fairy tale-like manner as Kurniawan draws parallels between what the country experiences and the narrative arc of his characters.
Based on classic archetypes, but never falling into cliché, these are people who lead fabled, and largely unfortunate, lives, like Dewi Ayu, a highly desired prostitute, and Maman Gendeng, an angry but sentimental thug. Kurniawan's characters' casual approach to life will leave readers equally entertained and appalled; they act on lust as easily as murder, and commit rape, incest and bestiality as though they are commonplace acts. Such hyperbole puts them at risk of becoming flat, dimensionless caricatures, but the direct manner Kurniawan employs to relate horrors, such as when Dewi Ayu rises from her own grave after being dead for 21 years, renders them footnotes in the greater story of Indonesian perseverance. In the act of their telling, these stories feel as though they become the sole means of survival.
Beauty Is a Wound is a marvelous postmodern parody--a fairy tale with no happy ending--that offers a critique of Indonesia's colonialist and violent history. --Justus Joseph, bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company