It’s the story of a ghost’s vengeance, and I had to provide the background for the ghost’s revenge. My first intention was to write a ghost story, and you can still read Beauty Is a Wound in that way.
Pramoedya and some other Indonesian writers did a great job with this in their historical novels. To be honest, that wasn’t my intention with the novel. Was this an attempt to reinterpret your nation’s story for a new generation of readers? Your novel weaves its way through Indonesia’s history, from the days of Dutch colonialism to the modern age of independence. However, in an interview for Text (the publisher), Ewa Kurniawan says that the book is first and foremost a ghost story, with Indonesia’s troubled history as the background: The cover of Cantik Itu Luka conveys more of the idea that if you scratch beneath the surface of contemporary Indonesian life there is a violent past that lurks unresolved – ready to pounce and cause mayhem. Wanting to check a couple of words and phrases that seemed rather incongruous in translation, I stumbled on an Indonesian edition at Google books, and discovered this striking cover, which I prefer to the rather bland cover (by John Gall) of the Text edition that I was reading. Perhaps that’s only as it should be, as one comes to grips with aspects of Indonesian history that most often lie buried beneath a veneer of restraint and good manners. Beauty is a Wound is very nearly 500 pages long, but it romps along with wilful disregard for the niceties of taste and decorum.
He is said to be the next Pramoedya, no doubt because this scathing satire is a critique of Indonesia’s past, but I find the scabrous wit in this novel more provocative than Pramoedya’s more moderate tone in The Girl from the Coast, the only Pramoedya I’ve read, see my review).
Beauty is a Wound is the first novel available in English by the rising star of Indonesian writing, Eka Kurniawan.
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