‘Beauty is a Wound’ by Eka Kurniawan (Review)

Eka Kurniawan, a rising star of Indonesian literature, recently visited Australia, speaking at the Melbourne Writers Festival. Sadly, I was unable to attend the session, but I did manage to get hold of one of his books. Beauty is a Wound (translated by Annie Tucker, review copy courtesy of Text Publishing) is a lengthy novel about Indonesian history and society, one with an intriguing start: “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. A shepherd boy, awakened from his nap under a frangipani tree, peed in his shorts and screamed, and his four sheep ran off haphazardly in between stones and wooden grave markers as if a tiger had been thrown into their midst.” (p.1)