Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound inspired by Indonesia’s past

Indonesia’s history is a spectre in Eka Kurniawan’s amazing novel Beauty is a Wound.

Eka Kurniawan stands out among Indonesians as a remarkable literary talent.

In October last year, I spent three weeks travelling across Indonesia with a small contingent of Australian and Indonesian writers, our final destination being the Ubud Readers and Writers Festival in Bali. Throughout the trip, intended to connect the two groups of writers, there was much discussion of the literature of our two nations, our points of remarkable commonality and markers of radical difference.

There was a sense of Indonesia — more so than Australia — being on the precipice of some quantifiable international relevance. This came largely down to Indonesia’s invitation to be the country of honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair, which had put much of its under-resourced literary industry in a mad rush to translate 1000 local titles in time for the showcase. Then there were the many, many whispers about the Java-born author Eka Kurniawan.

Kurniawan was to be published by the American cultural giant New Directions, the same publishing house that in the early 2000s established the posthumous legacy of the Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolano, bringing his work, in incredible translations mainly by Australia’s Chris Andrews, to English readers for the first time. The Bolano boom focused renewed attention on the literature of South America and other Spanish-speaking countries, the kind not witnessed since the emergence of Jorge Luis Borges as a towering 20th-century figure and the bestselling status of Gabriel Garcia Marquez in the 1980s.

Kurniawan, in those hushed conversations at Ubud and elsewhere, seemed to be carrying similar, possibly unrealistic, expectations for Indonesia in a significant year for the nation. His two novels to appear since in English translation — the slim novella Man Tiger and the sprawling epic Beauty is a Wound — indeed share any number of literary affinities with Bolano. There is a deep driving interest in history as a spectre that haunts the present and a literary obsession with violence as a pure form of ideology and action. Both writers came to literature informed largely by the contemporary political realities within their turbulent nations.

In Bolano’s case this was the political upheaval and various horrors of the Pinochet regime and the overturning of the social ideals of Salvador Allende (whom Bolano, perhaps fictionally, intended to directly and violently support). For Kurniawan, the unstable, bloody colonisation of Indonesia by the Dutch — which brought European writers within Kurniawan’s reach at his local library — and the massacres of 1965, alongside the resulting dictatorship of Suharto, informed his stark writing practice. Suharto’s anti-intellectual reign came to an end only in 1998, when Kurniawan was in his early 20s and beginning to work towards these novels.

Outside of their heated political birthing, these two extraordinary novels are both devoted to the myths — and indeed the colourful mysticism — of Indonesia, with Kurniawan powerfully spinning them into thriving new stories. Beauty is a Wound makes explicit references and connections within its pages to the 1965 massacres of hundreds of thousands of Indonesian communists, while also using its hysterical realist plot machinations to touch on the Japanese occupation during World War II and the attempted resurrection of Dutch colonial rule after the war had ended.

It is no wonder that the novel centres on the story of a ghost: the resurrected prostitute Dewi Ayu, a terrific literary invention. Dewi Ayu is deeply concerned with her four daughters, in particular the titular Beauty, the ugliest child imaginable, indeed so ugly the midwife at her birth confused her for a pile of fresh faeces.

Kurniawan’s humour has been described as distinctly Javanese (and indeed, when on tour last year, humour was hardest thing to reconcile between the local writers and the visiting Australians) but he is undeniably of Indonesia as a whole. Much of the Indonesian literature I have encountered is deceitfully playful when it comes to a sense of chronology. This can be put down to the lack of tenses — no past, present nor future — in the language (that translators can carry this across to their interpretations always impresses me).

Kurniawan takes this mode of writing to a more deliberate level — the question of Dewi Ayu’s status as dead or alive propels much of the uncertainty at the core of the book and delivers its biggest, weirdest laughs — but he plays a far more political game with time and dates. He deliberately shifts the date of Indonesian independence within his grand narrative to late September, weeks after it occurred in August. A minor shift for some, and with little actual dramatic effect, but for a country where so many factual accounts are outright denied, that truth has no home is significant. Fiction can act as the dictator of all governing laws and the novelist becomes the king.

Indeed, Indonesia is a country whose versions of its history seem transient at best, perpetually in the making. Kurniawan takes advantage of these half-truths and consciously plays the same role as the great American realists — as an imaginative chronicler of recent history; and even with his magic realist touches, he feels natural and true.

Beauty is a Wound is an epic of a kind that could only come from the pen of an Indonesian — its vivid imagination and cruel humour, the results of folkloric tradition (largely through Kurniawan’s evocation of wayang, Indonesia’s renowned shadow puppetry) and decades of functional corruption.

Kurniawan has confounded many because he is simultaneously working as a realist and an absurdist, staying true to the truly turbulent fictions and realities of his home country. The Jakarta Post, perhaps sensing this, wrote that Kurniawan is ‘‘one of the few influential writers in Indonesia’’, which seemed like a terrific compliment for the individual while it brutally damned the rest of the nation and its literature. But this perhaps is factual reporting, too — a sorry truth to needs to be faced in the light of Kurniawan’s unprecedented commercial and critical success.

A writer such as Kurniawan, with his original voice and rewired world view, might then be seen as a once-in-a-generation prospect for Indonesia, and certainly we have no novelist of his kind in Australia.

Kurniawan’s creative ambition and scope are traditional in some senses, but his deeply strange work is profoundly original. And, unlike the whore Dewi Ayu, you can never resurrect this, nor indeed kill it.

Sam Twyford-Moore is a writer and critic.

Beauty is a Wound

By Eka Kurniawan

Translated by Annie Tucker

Text Publishing, 384pp, $32.99