Beauty Is a Wound [Paperback]

The epic novelEkas approach inAn unforgettable, all-encompassing epic& Upon finishing the book, the reader will have the sense of encountering not just the history of Indonesia but its soul and spirit. This is an astounding, momentous book.Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be South-East Asias most ambitious writer in a generation.Very striking.An epic picaresque thats equal parts Canterbury Tales and Mahabharataexuberantly excessive and captivating. Huge ambition, abundantly realized.Without a doubt the most original, imaginatively profound, and elegant writer of fiction in Indonesia today: its brightest and most unexpected meteorite. Pramoedya Ananta Toer has found a successor.A vivacious translation of a comic but emotionally powerful Indonesian novel.Kurniawans story of an undead woman had morphed into the story of modern Indonesia, an epic novel critics are more wont to compare toAs translated by Annie Tucker, Kurniawans prose is lucid and occasionally lyrical but never showy.Kurniawan does not merely traffic skillfully in magic realism; his Halimunda  like Garc?a M?rquezs Macondo and Faulkners Yoknapatawpha County  lets him show how the currents of history catch, whirl, carry away and sometimes drown people.BothGracefully translated by Annie Tucker, the writing is evocative and muscular, with particularly spicy descriptions and some good wry humor.Its an astonishing, polyphonic epic, a melange of satire, grotesquerie, and allegory that incorporates everything from world history to local folk talks.An arresting portrait of Indonesias struggle for nationhood, delights in obscenity: no topic is spared from its bloodthirsty brand of satire.Refreshingly, Kurniawan puts value on literature as entertainment, and his books are certainly that.The English-language debut of Indonesia's rising star.