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Beauty Is a Wound cover art

Beauty Is a Wound

By: Eka Kurniawan
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
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Summary

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 21 years...." Drawing on local sources - folktales 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.

©2001 Eka Kurniawan (P)2015 Audible, Inc.
Family Life Literary Fiction Magical Realism Historical Fiction World Literature
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what a story!

wow! so original, with compelling characters, and constant unpredictable turns of the plot. reminiscent of gabriel garcia marquez. searched for postcolonial literature when i found this. really amazing

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