Beauty Is a Wound

Name: Beauty Is a Wound
Rating: 4.699999809265137 (10 reviews)

Eka Kurniawan

Sep 2015 · New Directions Publishing

10 reviews

Ebook

384

Pages

Tools

About this ebook

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 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.

Discover more

Ratings and reviews

10 reviews

Hotma Bayu

January 12, 2018

The story is so beautiful with so much Indonesian culture, heritage and even politic in it let alone the witty plot that was written very thorough and detail from the beginning until the end. So beautiful it hurts, just like its title.

1 person found this review helpful

Teddy Feby

July 28, 2017

Spent almost 2 week read it and worth it🙏👏

About the author

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.”

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.

Rate this ebook

Tell us what you think.

Reading information

Smartphones and tablets

Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.

Laptops and computers

You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.

eReaders and other devices

To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.

Flag as inappropriate