Eka Kurniawan

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.

Beauty is a Wound

Cantik Itu Luka

Camila

"If I might share my opinion, this world is hell, and our task is to create our own heaven." - Eka Kurniawan, Beauty Is a Wound. 

dyonisos.

''Really every woman is a whore, because even the most proper wife sells herself for a dowry and a shopping allowance... or love, if it exists, (...). It's not that I don't believe in love, actually it's the complete opposite, I do all of this with the utmost love. I was born into a Dutch family and was a Catholic until I recited my 

 and became a Muslim on my wedding day. I was married once and I was once a religious person. Just because I have lost all of that it doesn't mean I have lost love (...)''

Beauty is a Wound quotes

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