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.
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