Beauty Is a Wound

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  • Kusala Sastra Khatulistiwa Nominee for longlist (2003)
  • BTBA Best Translated Book Award Nominee for Fiction Longlist (2016)
  • Tähtifantasia Award Nominee (2018)
  • Metų verstinė knyga Nominee (2018)
Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.

Beauty Is a Wound

Regular price
Unit price
per
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ISBN: 9780811223638
Publisher: New Directions
Date of Publication: 2015-09-01
Format: Paperback
Related Collections: Historical Fiction, Fantasy
Related Topics: Magical Realism
Goodreads rating: 4.06
(rated by 14358 readers)

Description

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.
 

  • Kusala Sastra Khatulistiwa Nominee for longlist (2003)
  • BTBA Best Translated Book Award Nominee for Fiction Longlist (2016)
  • Tähtifantasia Award Nominee (2018)
  • Metų verstinė knyga Nominee (2018)
Note: While we do our best to ensure the accuracy of cover images, ISBNs may at times be reused for different editions of the same title which may hence appear as a different cover.