Beauty Is a Wound

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Beauty Is a Wound

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. Kurniawanâ€™s gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nationâ€™s troubled past:the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million â€œCommunists,â€ followed by three decades of Suhartoâ€™s despotic rule.

Â Â Â 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....Â Drawing on local sourcesâ€”folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scopeâ€”and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawanâ€™s distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.

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