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...]

AJO KAWIR CANNOT get an erection. He tries everything he can think of to fix the problem, including rubbing chopped up chili pepper on his genitals. Like the rest of his attempted treatments, it does nothing but cause him pain and humiliation. His “bird” — what the protagonist of Eka Kurniawan’s new … [Read more...]