A Writer’s Haunting Trip Through the Horrors of Indonesian History

Eka Kurniawan was in town for the Melbourne Writers Festival, his first stop on a global publicity tour for his novels “Man Tiger” and “Beauty Is a Wound,” which have just been translated into English. The latter novel, an arresting portrait of Indonesia’s struggle for nationhood, delights in obscenity: no topic is spared from its bloodthirsty brand of satire. His dark sense of humor emerges even when he writes about the hundreds of thousands of people killed in the anti-Communist purge, of 1965. Kurniawan said he did not want to show them as “merely the victims and the oppressed.”