‘Almost All of My Novels Talk About Power Structures’: A Conversation With Eka Kurniawan

It's the kind of surreal, often humorous prose we've come to expect from Eka. He was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize for fiction in 2016 for his book Man Tiger —a story about a man with an invisible tiger inside his body. His stories are unforgettable mixes of magical realism, drama, satire, and folklore. They're the kind of stories where fistfights or races are as common as women rising from the dead or a child being absorbed by an invisible white tiger. Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash includes tributes to some of Indonesia's best-known literary works, pencak silat, and pulpy crime novels. VICE's Stanley Widianto sat down with Eka over lunch out in Ciputat, Banten, to talk about his new book and whether Indonesian literature is trapped by the country's own past.