Description
Title: Beauty Is a Wound
Author: Annie Kurniawan, Eka; Tucker
ISBN: 9780811223638
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2015
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Number of Pages: 384
Condition Note: New from the publisher
Publisher : 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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