Beauty Is a Wound Eka KurniawanRead about the other entries on the list.
While actually released in 2002, young, Indonesian author Kurniawan’s novel only came out in English this year, but is such a powerful sprawling work, which deals with issues both global and personal that it deserves every possible accolade out there. Or, as we wrote in our review of it in October:
It’s an astonishing, polyphonic epic, a melange of satire, grotesquerie, and allegory that incorporates everything from world history to local folk talks. In style, it owes something to the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Márquez and Salman Rushdie; in structure and ambition, it recalls Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, another novel that foregrounds a picaresque narrative against the dense churn of history—in that case, Europe during and after World War II—as a way to understand that history’s effects on a place and its people.Read it.
--Marshal Zeringue
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