Review by New York Times Review
IN WHAT IS presumably late 1965, as Indonesia is racked by violence in the wake of a failed coup blamed on Communists, a gravedigger named Kamino hits upon a novel method of seduction: He allows himself to be possessed by the spirit of a recently murdered Communist so that the Communist's daughter can speak with her father one last time. In gratitude, she cooks Kamino dinner. A week later, after Kamino has buried 1,232 Communists in one mass grave, she accepts his marriage proposal. By the time the newlyweds return from their honeymoon, Eka Kurniawan's fictional Javanese city of Halimunda is "filled with corpses sprawled out in the irrigation channels and on the outskirts of the city, in the foothills and on the riverbanks, in the middle of bridges and under bushes. Most of them had been killed as they tried to escape." The violence in Halimunda has its roots in reality: Paramilitary groups strangled, beheaded, shot, garroted, bludgeoned and hacked up at least a half-million people (the killings are the subject of two extraordinary recent documentary films by Joshua Oppenheimer). But in "Beauty Is a Wound," Kurniawan approaches these events obliquely. His characters live on history's edges. In "Beauty Is a Wound" and "Man Tiger" - a slimmer work - his real subject is unruly, untameable and often unquenchable desires. Two years ago, the scholar Benedict Anderson published an essay in New Left Review pointing out that Southeast Asia is the only region in the world never to have produced a Nobel laureate in literature. He posited several possible reasons for this, chief among them the region's sheer diversity. Southeast Asia is home to the better part of a billion people belonging to hundreds of ethnic groups, speaking scores of languages, practicing dozens of religions and living in countries with radically different histories and governments. Such diversity precludes a synecdochic award: Nobody can represent the entire region in the same way that, say, Gabriel García Márquez represented Latin America, or Naguib Mahfouz represented Muslim life in the Arab world. The region's nearest Nobel miss was probably Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an Indonesian novelist and essayist who fell afoul of the repressive Suharto regime for his left-wing views. Pramoedya's best-known works are the four novels collectively known as the Buru Quartet, a sprawling account of a young Indonesian's political awakening under Dutch colonial rule. Pramoedya wrote these novels while imprisoned on Buru, a remote island in east Indonesia, and the actual writing came quite late. For much of his decade and a half in prison, during the late 1960s and the '70s, he was denied writing materials, and he narrated the stories in daily installments to his fellow prisoners. Kurniawan was born on Nov. 28, 1975, when Pramoedya was already 50 years old. (As Anderson notes in his introduction to "Man Tiger," that was also the day Portuguese Timor declared independence.) Though Kurniawan cites Pramoedya as one of his favorite Indonesian writers, the differences between the two are striking: Pramoedya wrote Tolstoyan political realism, while Kurniawan owes a clear debt to García Márquez, particularly in "Beauty Is a Wound." Kurniawan does not merely traffic skillfully in magic realism; his Halimunda - like García Márquez's Macondo and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County - lets him show how the currents of history catch, whirl, carry away and sometimes drown people. Nevertheless, both he and Pramoedya owe a tremendous debt to Indonesia's oral traditions: Their stories are digressive yet riveting, and their characters distinct and profound. Compared with many contemporary American novels, the two books of Kurniawan's reviewed here contain relatively little dialogue. He tells us what the characters do and how they feel, just as a storyteller would. And he knows the importance of a good hook, writing opening sentences that are enviable: "On the evening Margio killed Anwar Sadat, Kyai Jahro was blissfully busy with his fishpond" ("Man Tiger"); "One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for 21 years" ("Beauty Is a Wound"). In fact, the first sentence of nearly every chapter in the episodic "Beauty" grabs the reader and yanks him into the action - an essential quality in a book abundant with unexplained jumps in time and characters introduced on the fly. Dewi Ayu, a prostitute and mother to four daughters, is the center of "Beauty Is a Wound," and Beauty is her ferociously ugly youngest daughter - "so hideous that the midwife assisting her couldn't be sure whether it really was a baby and thought that maybe it was a pile" of excrement. Dewi is part Dutch and part Indonesian, the daughter of a half brother and half sister who fell in love and then fled, and the granddaughter of a Dutch nobleman's concubine who vanished after leaping off a cliff. The book begins with Dewi's resurrection and ends with her death. In between, Indonesia's turbulent 20th century marches through Halimunda - independence, Japanese occupation, Suharto's vicious war against the Communists and the violent stagnation of his long, despotic rule. This risks making Kurniawan's work sound like a chore, which it is not. García Márquez could fall into sententiousness and grandiosity; Kurniawan, by contrast, has a wry, Javanese sense of humor. When the Communist's daughter expresses shock that she is speaking with her deceased father - "But you are dead, Daddy!" - he replies, "Well don't be too jealous of me, you'll get your turn someday." Dewi Ayu's rise from the grave is not figurative: She was, by all accounts and in the eyes of every character, dead, until she wasn't. "It must be confusing that I rose again after 21 years," she tells Beauty. "Even that longhair who died on the cross was only dead for three days before he rose again." In addition to a delightful irreverence toward religion, Kurniawan has an unsettling way of stirring the supernatural into the quotidian: Gravediggers get possessed by the spirits of the dead, tigers live inside people, pigs turn into human beings, a baby vanishes from a pregnant woman's stomach in a violent belch. In a beautiful bit of irony, the only character who comes close to exercising control over any sort of magical events happens to be a devoted Communist and an opponent of superstition with an unsettling gift for effectively cursing people. These supernatural events happen as matter-of-factly as characters eating, copulating or defecating. One of the reasons such elements never seem cloying or overdone is Kurniawan's grounding focus on the body and its desires, beauty and repulsiveness (mostly its repulsiveness: Many readers may find themselves wishing for slightly less feces). In "Man Tiger," the supernatural is rather more restrained: a few peripheral genies and a single female tiger - "white as a swan, vicious as an ajak," or wild dog - living inside one young man. Both novels are fundamentally family sagas, though where "Beauty" is discursive and epic, "Man Tiger" is tight, focused and thrilling. Like a good crime novel, "Man Tiger" works best when read in a single sitting, and its propulsive suspense is all the more remarkable because Kurniawan reveals both victim and murderer in the first sentence. When introducing a writer from a region underrepresented in the Western literary consciousness, one must fight the temptation to overstate the extent to which his work is "about" his home country; writing fiction is hard enough without forcing authors to bear the yoke of representation. Pramoedya, of course, accepted that yoke willingly. Whether Kurniawan, who is only 39 years old, will choose to do the same remains to be seen. But judging from these two novels, whatever he chooses to write will be well worth reading. JON FASMAN is The Economist's Southeast Asia bureau chief and the author of two novels, "The Unpossessed City" and "The Geographer's Library."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 6, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Beauty is a wound and a curse. Arguably nobody knows this better than Dewi Ayu, the larger-than-life anchor of Kurniawan's glorious English-language debut. Set upon the path of prostitution after serving as a Japanese comfort woman, the Dutch-Indonesian Dewi Ayu and her vibrant and troubled life serve as potent allegory for Indonesia itself, an island nation that is strikingly rich in beauty and natural resources yet cursed with more than its share of political turmoil. Dewi's daughters, Alamanda, Adinita, Maya Dewi, and Beauty most of whom inherit her legendary good looks are all trapped in damaging relationships, even if they eke out a modicum of grace in the end. Indonesia's milestones the Japanese occupation, the rise of communism, and Suharto's despotic reign are reflected in the women's individual narratives. The lively folk tales and mythological stories from the Mahabharata that pepper the novel cleverly mask such darker elements as rape and bestiality, the inclusion of which, one should add, feels organic and never gratuitous. Even if the allegories sometimes seem forced, what emerges is a vivid, bawdy, and arresting epic painted with bold strokes on a vast canvas. Highly recommended.--Apte, Poornima Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
At the beginning of this English-language debut from Indonesian author Kurniawan, Dewi Ayu, who was once the most respected prostitute in the fictional coastal town of Halimunda, rises from her grave after being dead for two decades. She's returned to pay a visit to her fourth daughter, Beauty, who is famously ugly. What follows is an unforgettable, all-encompassing epic of Indonesian history, magic, and murder, jumping back to Dewi Ayu's birth before World War II, in the last days of Dutch rule, and continuing through the Japanese occupation and the mass killings following the attempted coup by the Indonesian Communist Party in the mid-1960s. Kurniawan centers his story on Dewi Ayu and her four daughters and their families. Readers witness Dewi Ayu's imprisonment in the jungle during the war, a pig turning into a person, a young Communist named Comrade Kliwon engaging in guerrilla warfare, and a boy cheating in school by asking ghosts for help. Indeed, the combination of magic, lore, and pivotal events reverberating through generations will prompt readers to draw parallels between Kurniawan's Halimunda and García Márquez's Macondo. But Kurniawan's characters are all destined for despair and sorrow, and the result is a darker and more challenging read than One Hundred Years of Solitude. There is much physical and sexual violence, but none of it feels gratuitous-every detail seems essential to depicting Indonesia's tragic past. 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. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
This English-language debut of trending Indonesian author Kurniawan opens with beautiful prostitute Dewi Ayu arising from the grave after 21 years and encountering her child Beauty, whom she had cursed with ugliness. The initial feeling of legend, dare one say magic realism, is quickly overtaken by the brutal facts of Indonesian history, from the last gasp of Dutch colonialism to World War II and the bloody battle for independence and against presumed Communists. VERDICT A lush, raucous, and fabulous saga. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
English-language debut of a celebrated Indonesian author. "One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for 21 years." With this surprising sentence, Kurniawan sets the stage for an epic picaresque that's equal parts Canterbury Tales and Mahabharata. Weaving back in forth in time, moving from character to character, the author tells the story of Indonesia from its Dutch colonial days, through the Japanese occupation during World War II, and into independence as a modern state. Kurniawan's characters are broadly drawn, but they aren't one-dimensional. Dewi Ayu, the most sought-after prostitute in the seaside city of Halimunda, is a shrewd, fearless, and resourceful woman but an ambivalent mother. Her lover, Maman Gendeng, is a romantic thug. The soldier Sodancho is both an illustrious revolutionary and a self-serving racketeer; he's also a rapist. These contradictions are more mythic than psychologically subtle, a reminder that few heroes are purely heroic. The great warriors of yore often come across as bullies and thugs, and when Homer called Ulysses "wily," it wasn't meant as a compliment. Some readers may object to this author's blithe depiction of horrorsincluding incest, bestiality, and murderbut that, too, makes good folkloric sense. In fairy tales, monstrosity is a sign, and violence is a catalyst; the concept of lingering trauma has no hold on the folk imagination and no place in the world Kurniawan has constructed. There are undoubtedly references and resonances here that are meaningful only to those well-versed in Indonesian history and indigenous storytelling traditions, but that's as it should be: Kurniawan is an Indonesian writer. That said, Anglophone readers are lucky to have access to this exuberantly excessive and captivating novel. Huge ambition, abundantly realized. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
