"Beauty is a Wound" Author: [Indonesia] Eka Guniawan Publisher: Wenhui Publishing House

Introduction · · · · · ·
𓆙The New York Times' "100 Books Worth Watching" |Publishers Weekly's Best Books of the Year |

The Guardian's Top Ten Literary Novels of the Year | Winner of the US Emerging Voices Literary Award

𓆙A stunning new star of magical realism! Southeast Asian version of "One Hundred Years of Solitude", simplified Chinese version published for the first time

The author Guniawan skillfully uses magical realism. His Halimunda, like Gabriel García Márquez's Macondo and Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, shows how people are captured, disturbed, engulfed and drowned by the torrent of history. - The New York Times

An epic that blends history, mythology, and bloodbath, all-encompassing and unforgettable. It's darker than One Hundred Years of Solitude. - Publishers Weekly

Eka Guniawan's writing is rough, cunning and humorous. He may be the most ambitious writer of his generation in Southeast Asia. - The Economist

𓆙In the chaotic and violent era, beauty is the biggest curse! The most beautiful prostitute in the city, a portrait of "burning" Indonesia, a panoramic reproduction of love, desire, life and death buried under the wounds of history

Beauty is Indonesia's wound. The archipelago has long been coveted by outsiders for its exotic splendor and rich resources - a kind of imperial rape. -Brooklyn Magazine

-------

Dewi Aiyu crawled out of her grave on a weekend afternoon in March, twenty-one years after she died. A shepherd boy napping under a frangipani tree woke up, screaming and wetting his shorts, and his four sheep ran between the stone and wooden tombstones as if a tiger had pounced among them. First, there were noises in an old cemetery. There was an unmarked headstone in the old cemetery, surrounded by knee-high grass, but everyone knew it was Dewi Aiyu's grave. She was fifty-two years old, dead and alive for twenty-one years, and no one knew how to calculate her age from then on.

When the miracle happened, the scene was incredible. The graves shook and cracked, causing a small earthquake and storm, weeds and tombstones flew up, and the dust fell like a curtain of rain. People ran away hysterically, the scene was more chaotic than a flock of sheep fleeing. A woman threw her baby into the bushes, and the child's father mistook a piece of banana stem for the child to comfort him. Two men jumped into a ditch, some fainted on the side of the road, and some ran as fast as they could, running for 15 kilometers before stopping.