Beauty Is A Wound
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¨Dfolk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope¨Dand inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan¡¯s distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.