Text

Cantik Itu Luka ; Sebuah Novel

---

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.

---

Availability

Detail Information

Series Title

-

Call Number

F KUR c

Publisher

Jakarta : PT Gramedia Pustaka Utama., 2016

Collation

14 x 20 cm.: 479 p.

Language

Indonesia

ISBN/ISSN

9786020312583

Classification

F KUR c

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

-

Subject(s)

Fiction
Indonesian literature
Historical fiction
magical realism
FD01958
FD01738
FD01753

Specific Detail Info

Pluit Putri Library

Statement of Responsibility

Eka Kurniawan

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment