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Beauty Is a Wound

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Beauty Is a Wound

Written by: Eka Kurniawan
Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
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About this listen

The English-language debut of Indonesia's rising star. 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 21 years...." Drawing on local sources - folktales 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.

©2001 Eka Kurniawan (P)2015 Audible, Inc. Genre Fiction Historical Literary Fiction Magical Realism World Literature
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This book feels like the pages one might find in the diary of an extremely horny and imaginative teenager. It was borderline disturbing in its fixation on beastiality, incest and sexual assault.

I understand that this book is supposed to be a satirical view of the assault by white colonisers on Asian, African and Pacific Islander colonies. But after a point it felt like I had to reach too much and too far to make those connections.

The book’s premise is interesting and yes, there are some inventive themes , but this book is very mysoginistic in its portrayal of how a woman and her beauty are the root cause of every problem in the world ; and how men are forced to commit crimes because of women tempting them with their beauty.

Also, the final chapter has some sort of recording error and makes a very frustrating listen.

Sexist, misogynistic and disrespectful of women

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