Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan, translated by Annie Tucker

Kurniawan has frequently been mentioned in the same breath as the late Pramoedya Anata Toer in profiles and reviews. Indeed, the cover of Beauty is a Wound carries a blurb from the renowned scholar of Indonesian history Benedict Anderson declaring that in Kurniawan “Pramoedya Anata Toer has found a successor”. The comparison is inevitable, given that Pramoedya is just about the only Indonesian author with any significant degree of international recognition. But the comparison is also largely meaningless, for as that first sentence suggests, Kurniawan’s wild storytelling bears scant resemblance to Pramoedya’s earnest historical realism.