‘Beauty Is a Wound’ and ‘Man Tiger’ by Eka Kurniawan
Jon Fasman
Septiembre 9, 2015
In what is presumably late 1965, as Indonesia is racked by violence in the wake of a failed coup blamed on Communists, a gravedigger named Kamino hits upon a novel method of seduction: He allows himself to be possessed by the spirit of a recently murdered Communist so that the Communist’s daughter can speak with her father one last time. In gratitude, she cooks Kamino dinner. A week later, after Kamino has buried 1,232 Communists in one mass grave, she accepts his marriage proposal. By the time the newlyweds return from their honeymoon, Eka Kurniawan’s fictional Javanese city of Halimunda is “filled with corpses sprawled out in the irrigation channels and on the outskirts of the city, in the foothills and on the riverbanks, in the middle of bridges and under bushes. Most of them had been killed as they tried to escape.”
The violence in Halimunda has its roots in reality: Paramilitary groups strangled, beheaded, shot, garroted, bludgeoned and hacked up at least a half-million people (the killings are the subject of two extraordinary recent documentary films by Joshua Oppenheimer). But in “Beauty Is a Wound,” Kurniawan approaches these events obliquely. His characters live on history’s edges. In “Beauty Is a Wound” and “Man Tiger” — a slimmer work — his real subject is unruly, untameable and often unquenchable desires.
Two years ago, the scholar Benedict Anderson published an essay in New Left Review pointing out that Southeast Asia is the only region in the world never to have produced a Nobel laureate in literature. He posited several possible reasons for this, chief among them the region’s sheer diversity. Southeast Asia is home to the better part of a billion people belonging to hundreds of ethnic groups, speaking scores of languages, practicing dozens of religions and living in countries with radically different histories and governments. Such diversity precludes a synecdochic award: Nobody can represent the entire region in the same way that, say, Gabriel García Márquez represented Latin America, or Naguib Mahfouz represented Muslim life in the Arab world.
The region’s nearest Nobel miss was probably Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an Indonesian novelist and essayist who fell afoul of the repressive Suharto regime for his left-wing views. Pramoedya’s best-known works are the four novels collectively known as the Buru Quartet, a sprawling account of a young Indonesian’s political awakening under Dutch colonial rule. Pramoedya wrote these novels while imprisoned on Buru, a remote island in east Indonesia, and the actual writing came quite late. For much of his decade and a half in prison, during the late 1960s and the ’70s, he was denied writing materials, and he narrated the stories in daily installments to his fellow prisoners.
Kurniawan was born on Nov. 28, 1975, when Pramoedya was already 50 years old. (As Anderson notes in his introduction to “Man Tiger,” that was also the day Portuguese Timor declared independence.) Though Kurniawan cites Pramoedya as one of his favorite Indonesian writers, the differences between the two are striking: Pramoedya wrote Tolstoyan political realism, while Kurniawan owes a clear debt to García Márquez, particularly in “Beauty Is a Wound.” Kurniawan does not merely traffic skillfully in magic realism; his Halimunda — like García Márquez’s Macondo and Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County — lets him show how the currents of history catch, whirl, carry away and sometimes drown people.
Nevertheless, both he and Pramoedya owe a tremendous debt to Indonesia’s oral traditions: Their stories are digressive yet riveting, and their characters distinct and profound. Compared with many contemporary American novels, the two books of Kurniawan’s reviewed here contain relatively little dialogue. He tells us what the characters do and how they feel, just as a storyteller would. And he knows the importance of a good hook, writing opening sentences that are enviable: “On the evening Margio killed Anwar Sadat, Kyai Jahro was blissfully busy with his fishpond” (“Man Tiger”); “One afternoon on a weekend in March, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for 21 years” (“Beauty Is a Wound”). In fact, the first sentence of nearly every chapter in the episodic “Beauty” grabs the reader and yanks him into the action — an essential quality in a book abundant with unexplained jumps in time and characters introduced on the fly.
Dewi Ayu, a prostitute and mother to four daughters, is the center of “Beauty Is a Wound,” and Beauty is her ferociously ugly youngest daughter — “so hideous that the midwife assisting her couldn’t be sure whether it really was a baby and thought that maybe it was a pile” of excrement. Dewi is part Dutch and part Indonesian, the daughter of a half brother and half sister who fell in love and then fled, and the granddaughter of a Dutch nobleman’s concubine who vanished after leaping off a cliff. The book begins with Dewi’s resurrection and ends with her death.
In between, Indonesia’s turbulent 20th century marches through Halimunda — independence, Japanese occupation, Suharto’s vicious war against the Communists and the violent stagnation of his long, despotic rule. This risks making Kurniawan’s work sound like a chore, which it is not. García Márquez could fall into sententiousness and grandiosity; Kurniawan, by contrast, has a wry, Javanese sense of humor. When the Communist’s daughter expresses shock that she is speaking with her deceased father — “But you are dead, Daddy!” — he replies, “Well don’t be too jealous of me, you’ll get your turn someday.”
Dewi Ayu’s rise from the grave is not figurative: She was, by all accounts and in the eyes of every character, dead, until she wasn’t. “It must be confusing that I rose again after 21 years,” she tells Beauty. “Even that longhair who died on the cross was only dead for three days before he rose again.” In addition to a delightful irreverence toward religion, Kurniawan has an unsettling way of stirring the supernatural into the quotidian: Gravediggers get possessed by the spirits of the dead, tigers live inside people, pigs turn into human beings, a baby vanishes from a pregnant woman’s stomach in a violent belch. In a beautiful bit of irony, the only character who comes close to exercising control over any sort of magical events happens to be a devoted Communist and an opponent of superstition with an unsettling gift for effectively cursing people. These supernatural events happen as matter-of-factly as characters eating, copulating or defecating. One of the reasons such elements never seem cloying or overdone is Kurniawan’s grounding focus on the body and its desires, beauty and repulsiveness (mostly its repulsiveness: Many readers may find themselves wishing for slightly less feces).
In “Man Tiger,” the supernatural is rather more restrained: a few peripheral genies and a single female tiger — “white as a swan, vicious as an ajak,” or wild dog — living inside one young man. Both novels are fundamentally family sagas, though where “Beauty” is discursive and epic, “Man Tiger” is tight, focused and thrilling. Like a good crime novel, “Man Tiger” works best when read in a single sitting, and its propulsive suspense is all the more remarkable because Kurniawan reveals both victim and murderer in the first sentence.
When introducing a writer from a region underrepresented in the Western literary consciousness, one must fight the temptation to overstate the extent to which his work is “about” his home country; writing fiction is hard enough without forcing authors to bear the yoke of representation. Pramoedya, of course, accepted that yoke willingly. Whether Kurniawan, who is only 39 years old, will choose to do the same remains to be seen. But judging from these two novels, whatever he chooses to write will be well worth reading.
BEATY IS WOUND
Translated by Annie Tucker
470 pp. New Directions. Paper, $19.95.
MAN TIGER
By Eka Kurniawan
Translated by Labodalih Sembiring
172 pp. Verso. Paper, $18.95.
Jon Fasman is The Economist’s Southeast Asia bureau chief and the author of two novels, “The Unpossessed City” and “The Geographer’s Library.”
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