Beauty Is a Wound

By: Eka Kurniawan

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis

The English-language debut of Indonesia's rising star. 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 21 years...." Drawing on local sources - folktales 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.

©2001 Eka Kurniawan (P)2015 Audible, Inc.

Enthralling

This was an audiobook. What a great story weaver the author is! I would highly recommend.

horrifyingly grotesque

what in the world did I just read? why are all the women described in disgusting ways? everything is just grotesque and gross.
also there were a good 5 chapters that I didn't necessarily think needed to be included... like chapter 6 with Shodancho going to war... like why did we need to know that?
finally we get to the last chapter that tells what truly happened... ghosts, evil spirits and revenge oh my. ghosts assuming other identities... like what? I need a mm to mentally wash off all those disturbing things I read in this book.

beauty is a wound... like beauty is a curse? not sure if lost in translation?

As a woman im in my feelings that a man sat down and thought of a story in such a grotesque way but that's just me...

Perfect balance of humour and sadness

I enjoyed this audio book, though not sure I would have finished if it were not for the narrators entertaining depiction of characters and story.

Weird

I kept listening out of intrigue as in where is the going. The narration was superb. The voices accurately depicting what the words were describing. May be the best dramatic reading I have heard. The moral of the tale is all in the title. It is worth a listen as long as you are prepared to be confused by the stupidity of some characters and the audacity of others. And then there is the supernatural component that you simply need to ride along with.

Like nothing I've read (heard) before

While this is most certainly a graphic book and explores in at some times crude terms the facets of love and desire, there is so much going on that I will need to listen to it a second time to pick up everything the author is saying. One of my new favorites!