Both Indonesia and India share the Mahabharataas a common text, but with differences. The Amba episode in India results in the creation of the first epic transgender Shikhandi whose task is to kill the man who ruined her life. Bhisma remains the common target for revenge, but in the Indonesian … [Read more...]

Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash, by the Indonesian author of Beauty Is a Wound, is a surreal, poignant account of a teen attempting to become a man. The novel Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash opens simply, by stating its premise: The teenager Ajo Kawir has a bit of a hardware … [Read more...]

Eka Kurniawan is the Quentin Tarantino of Indonesian literature: a brash wunderkind, delivering gleeful references to pulp fiction, lashings of stylized violence, and an array of characters and scenarios that far surpass the tropes and clichés which inspire them. But as with Quentin Tarantino, one … [Read more...]

Kurniawan (Beauty Is a Wound) tells the ribald, noir-inflected, and oddly epic story of a man’s quest to regain his sexual virility. Teenage Javanese roughneck Ajo Kawir loses the use of his “little bird” after witnessing the rape of a widow by two soldiers. He tries everything to revive it: … [Read more...]

Jakarta street fighter Ajo Kawir has one big problem. Or, you might say, one little one. He is impotent. It’s spelt out in the second sentence of Eka Kurniawan’s novel and expounded regularly over the following pages. It wasn’t always so; as a boy he enjoyed peeping at the local madwoman, Scarlet … [Read more...]