Beauty Is a Wound - Eka Kurniawan, Annie Tucker torrent

Category: Adults, Historical Fiction, Literature, Novel
Language: English
Keywords: Indonesia Magical Realism

Written by Eka Kurniawan, Annie Tucker
Read by Jonathan Davis
Format: MP3
Bitrate: Variable
Unabridged

Original publication date: 2002 (in Indonesian) / 2015 (English translation)
Audiobook release date: 2016
Publisher: Bolinda/Audible audio
Audiobook duration: 16:29:30

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New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of the Year

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.

Translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker.