Beauty Is a Wound

By: Eka Kurniawan

Narrated by: Jonathan Davis

Length: 16 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

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...

Beauty is apparently a wound

Very interesting storyline which wandered greatly throughout the story, but did finally bring itself to a culmination of all the stories. I really enjoyed this book and the tales it told. Very well worth a read

Historical fantasy

Great story with historical context. An prostitute comes back to life to recount Indonesia's civil war

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!

An amazing novel.

Enjoyed every moment of it. Funny, heartbreaking with an amazing end yet so unfinished. Extremely recommend it

Like One Hundred Years of Solitude & Animal Farm

If you enjoy allegorical tales; yearn to learn and think as you read without being overly challenged; delight in discovering (or trying to) the metaphorical meaning of actions, characters and things within a story; and/or relished "Animal Farm" and/or "One Hundred Years of Solitude,"

You should definitely read this novel which reflects and criticizes the turbulent history of the world's 4th most populous country Indonesia, a country of more than 14,000 islands and of terrible tsunamis. Indonesia's native citizens suffered under three and a half centuries of Dutch rule, Japanese occupation for 3 years during WWII, the mass slaughter of possibly a million citizens after the failed Communist coup in 1965, followed by the despotic rule of Suharto for 3 decades.

Kurniawan tells this tempestuous history by the epic story, by turns ridiculous, magical and hilarious but always captivating, of Dewi Ayu, the 3/4 Dutch and 1/4 Malaysian girl forced into prostitution in her late teens upon Japanese occupation, her four daughters (each with different fathers), their lovers and husbands, Dewi Ayu's 3 grandchildren, and the village of Halimundo, which is very reminiscent of the village of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Kurniawan also weaves in colorful, intriguing local folklore to make his points.

While the novel contains some scenes of the grotesque and of rapes, they did not seem gratuitous and I can't say they weren't needed to reflect the tragedies that have befallen Indonesia and its residents.

I'll go out on a limb to say this fascinating, sordid and intellectually stimulating novel is destined to be deemed a classic written by the young Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan, for whom the comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Marquez are well-deserved.

Narrator didn’t do research on pronunciation of Indonesian words

Why didn’t they hire a narrator who has some experience with the Indonesian language? Or better yet a voice actor from Indonesia? Disappointed that this wonderful Indonesian novel was read in a way that doesn’t fully convey the language and therefore the culture that this work comes from. Do better, Audible, to represent Southeast Asia in media.