Beauty Is a Wound (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780811223638)

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.

Author: Eka Kurniawan
ISBN-10: 0811223639
ISBN-13: 9780811223638
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Language: English
Published: 09/08/2015
Pages: 384
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 7.80h x 5.40w x 1.30d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 06/08/2015
Kirkus Reviews 07/01/2015
Booklist 09/15/2015 pg. 26
Library Journal 09/15/2015 pg. 70
New York Times Book Review 09/13/2015 pg. 9
New York Times Book Review 09/20/2015 pg. 26
Shelf Awareness 09/18/2015
New York Review of Books 10/22/2015 pg. 60
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/02/2015 pg. 25
Kirkus Best Fiction 11/15/2015 pg. 22
NY Times Notable Bks of Year 12/06/2015 pg. 26
Booklist Editors Choice/Adult 01/01/2016 pg. 8