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. Kurniawans gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nations 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 Suhartos 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 sourcesfolk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scopeand inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawans distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.