Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty Is A Wound is a surreal, riveting read

One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years.” So begins Beauty Is A Wound, by Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan, translated by Annie Tucker.

It’s a enthralling read – richly and densely imagined and described, epic in proportions, often bewildering in the twists and turns of its plot, and breathtakingly bizarre in its strangeness, its grotesque humour, its scenes of dazzling tenderness and loveliness laid bare alongside those of obscene and extreme cruelty, pain, sorrow and devastation.