Beauty is a Wound

Eka Kurniawan's novel Beauty is a Wound – first published in Indonesian in 2002, but only now available in English translation – has a wonderfully memorable opening line:

One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for 21 years

Kurniawan has frequently been mentioned in the same breath as the late Pramoedya Anata Toer in profiles and reviews. Indeed, the cover of Beauty is a Wound carries a blurb from the renowned scholar of Indonesian history Benedict Anderson declaring that in Kurniawan "Pramoedya Anata Toer has found a successor." The comparison is inevitable, given that Pramoedya is just about the only Indonesian author with any significant degree of international recognition. But the comparison is also largely meaningless, for as that first sentence suggests, Kurniawan's wild storytelling bears scant resemblance to Pramoedya's earnest historical realism.