Many other authors have experienced the same thing, I guess. And I am trying to write my novels to come. I have been moving to various other ways of thought. Not because of the time span, which is more than one decade, but because of things that have happened. I have to look back at what I thought and what I felt when I was writing the novel. Over the years, many people (not only abroad, but even in Indonesia, many readers have only recently discovered Beauty is a Wound) have been buzzing about it and asking me questions. How do you react to this attention? What is it like to discuss a book that you wrote a long while ago? Are you the same person? And has been on the ‘notable books list of 2015’ in The Guardian and The New York Times.
It has taken more than a decade to reach an English-speaking audience. In an email interview with Open, the 40-year-old author who has been compared with Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, discusses the influences of the Mahabharata on his work and the necessity of portraying violence.īeauty is a Wound was first published in 2002. But it is through these ravages and atrocities that Kurniawan throws a blinding light on the genocide of 1965 in Indonesia, the three-decade long despotic rule of Suharto and the greed of colonialism. Over the course of the novel, she and her four daughters suffer every kind of outrage. Dewi Ayu, a half-Dutch, half-Indonesian woman, renowned for her beauty and her smarts, is the matriarch at the centre of it all. Translated into English last year, it combines history and events with myth, magic and hyperbole to create something truly fantastic. ‘ONE AFTERNOON ON a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years.’ The first line of Indonesian writer Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound (Speaking Tiger, 470 Pages, Rs 499) sets the mood for the rest of this grand historic tale.
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