![]() It is, especially at the level of structure, an awesome achievement. “Beauty Is a Wound,” the first of Kurniawan’s novels to be translated into English (along with “Man Tiger,” a slim work), is a controlled sprawl, massive but not messy. (The book opens with an epigraph from the greatest instance of that genre, “Don Quixote.”)Īll of this - the comedy and the historical heft, the intricate plot and even more intricate character system - should make for an overstuffed, elephantine novel. ![]() Yet it’s also an acutely comic novel, by which I mean both that it is humorous in a bawdy, Rabelaisian way and that it displays the picaresque structure typical of the classic comic novel. It’s an acutely political novel, telling the story of Indonesia’s growth from an exploited Dutch colony to an ideologically riven young nation. ![]() It churns out plot after plot, character after character, drawing from a seemingly endless fund of yarns and anecdotes and myths. Eka Kurniawan’s “Beauty Is a Wound” is a powerful engine of storytelling. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |