Beauty Is a Wound - Brossura

Kurniawan, Eka

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0811223639 ISBN 13: 9780811223638

Casa editrice: New Directions, 2015

Riassunto

The epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humor, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan’s gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation’s troubled past:the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million “Communists,” followed by three decades of Suharto’s despotic rule. Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years.... Drawing on local sources—folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope—and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawan’s distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.

Su questo libro

Recensione:

"Kurniawan does not merely traffic skillfully in magic realism; his Halimunda like García Márquez's Macondo and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County lets him show how the currents of history catch, whirl, carry away and sometimes drown people." -- The New York Times

"An arresting portrait of Indonesia's struggle for nationhood, delights in obscenity: no topic is spared from its bloodthirsty brand of satire."

--The New Yorker

"...an unforgettable, all-encompassing epic of Indonesian history, magic, and murder....The combination of magic, lore, and pivotal events reverberating through generations will prompt readers to draw parallels between Kurniawan's Halimunda and García Márquez s Macondo. But Kurniawan's characters are all destined for despair and sorrow, and the result is a darker and more challenging read than One Hundred Years of Solitude. An astounding, momentous book." --Publishers Weekly

"Without a doubt the most original, imaginatively profound, and elegant writer of fiction in Indonesia today: its brightest and most unexpected meteorite. Pramoedya Ananta Toer has found a successor." -- The New Left Review

"The howling masterpiece of 2015 must surely be Eka Kurniawan's Beauty is a Wound. It is - I mean it - a howl, an outrage, and a sheer burst of particular talent. It is the kind of thing you want fiction to do, and the kind of thing you want to imagine it is doing...Kurniawan sharpens the story of Indonesia with an energy that is rare." -- Chigozie Obioma, Financial Times Best Books of 2015

"Eka Kurniawan's first novel Beauty Is a Wound has already been compared to García Márquez and Rushdie...his books are so distinct and memorable."

--The Guardian

L'autore:

Born in 1975, the author of novels, short stories, essays, movie scripts, and graphic novels Eka Kurniawan has been described as "one of the few influential writers in Indonesia" (The Jakarta Post).

Su questa edizione

• Editore: New Directions
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0811223639
• ISBN 13: 9780811223638
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 470