It is that time of
year again, where all the literary publications come out with their favourite
books of the year, where we spend time reflecting on what has happened in the
last twelve months and where personally I countdown to the 25th of December
with my favourite twelve works in translation that I have read in the previous
year.
Whilst I do this
countdown I continue to read more works and therefore the period of my
reflection is from 1 December 2014 to 30 November 2015 and I must admit it has
been a year that took quite a bit of reflection to come up with my favourite
works. The stand outs were still stand outs but you’ll have to wait a few more
weeks to see which books I rated as the top 3 or 4 of the year, but when it
came to culling the list down to twelve works from the eighty-eight I have
reviewed in the last year it was an onerous task indeed.
Starting off with number
twelve on my list…Beauty Is A Wound by Eka Kurniawan (translated by Annie
Tucker). I had the privilege of catching Eka Kurniawan when he was a guest of
the Melbourne Writer’s Festival which in no way influenced my decision to
include this work on my list.
Indonesian literature
was not an area I had previously explored prior to this work and this novel
covers the breadth of Indonesian history from Dutch rule through the Japanese
Invasion, Suharto’s culling of communists, and does so using local myth and
shadow puppet stories, bring each of the allegorical characters to life. An
often brutal work, it is a book that keeps you guessing as to the fate of each
of the characters, with a Tarantino style it is not unheard of for the main character
to suddenly meet an awful fate.
Kurniawan’s novel
opens with Dewi Ayu coming back from the dead after being buried for twenty-one
years. The first thing she thinks about is her “baby” Beauty (Dewi Ayu dies
twelve days after giving birth). Beauty is a child she tried to abort a number
of times, given she already had three daughters (all children are to unknown
fathers) and she was nearly fifty years of age, and Beauty is the ugliest baby
known, after Dewi Ayu had given birth to three stunningly beautiful girls:
However it was true that Dewi Ayu tried to
kill the baby back when she realized that, whether or not she had already lived
for a whole half century, she was pregnant once again. Just as with her other
children, she didn’t know who the father was, but unlike the others she had absolutely
no desire for the baby to survive. So she had taken five extra-strength
paracetamol pills that she got from a village doctor and washed them down with
half a liter of soda, which was almost enough to cause her own death but not
quite, as it turned out, enough to kill that baby. She thought of another way,
and called a midwife who was willing to kill the baby and take it out of her
womb by inserting a small wooden stick into her belly. She experienced heavy
bleeding for two days and two nights and the small piece of wood came back out
in splinters, but the baby kept growing. She tried six other ways to get the
better of that baby, but all were in vain, and she finally gave up and
complained:
“This one is a real brawler, and she’s clearly
going to beat her mother in this fight.”
We then travel back in
time to Dewi Ayu’s youth, her marriage to an old mad man, being taken prisoner
by the Japanese as part of their invasion of Indonesia and then being forced
into prostitution.
This novel (by having
Dewi Ayu coming back from the dead) managed to cover eighty or so years of
Indonesian history. A work that is 470 pages in length (the Australian edition
runs to nearly 500 pages) there is a lot of territory to cover. This is done by
running multiple stories, all linked to Dewi Ayu in some way. We have Maman
Gendeng, an indestructible criminal, who lands in Halimunda (where our story is
set) in search of a legendary princess only to find that the story was 200
years old, as a result he proposes to the prostitute Dewi Ayu instead. We also
have Shodancho a guerrilla revered by the community, a rival of sorts to Maman
Gendeng, who becomes the leader of the military and is in love with one of Dewi
Ayu’s daughters. And we have Comrade Kliwon, naturally a communist, who is a
womaniser but also in love with the same daughter of Dewi Ayu.
The novel feels as
though it is a collection of stand-alone stories, but the intertwining of
characters and the passage of time as well as Dewi Ayu being the spine of the
stories gives the novel multiple linkages.
Drawing on Indonesian
folklore there are people who fly, rebirths, and ghosts a plenty, all of this
with the backdrop of extreme violence, including sexual violence. But
each of the extreme situations are either balanced with humour or with the
level headedness of one of the female characters.
The fact was, most people of Kalamunda were
superstitious. They still believed the demons, spooks, and all kinds of
supernatural beings ran wild in the cemetery, living among the spirits of the
dead. And they also believed that the gravedigger lived in close communion with
all of these supernatural beings. Aware of his difficult situation, Kamino had
never even tried proposing to anyone. His only interactions with other people
happened in the course of his business. He usually just stayed at home, a humid
house made out of moldy old concrete shaded by big banyan trees. The sole
entertainment in his lonely life was playing jailangkun –
calling the spirits of the dead using a little effigy doll – another skill that
had been passed down through the generations of his family, good for invoking
the spirits to chat with them about all kinds of things.
This book is littered
with little amusing anecdotes – as an example the village of Halimunda
celebrates Independence Day on a different date that the rest of Indonesia,
this is a result of the news travelling slowly to the village.
I’ll leave the linear
(or more circular) plot quite bare for you to enjoy the novel yourself, however
this work does cover sweeping epic times in Indonesian history, the invasion by
the Japanese, the slaughter of thousands of communists, living under Suharto’s
dictatorship, military rule and these events are all covered here. With the
three husbands of the three daughters representing military, communism and
criminals, the power struggles are obvious to see, as an aside the police are
ineffectual.
A great introduction
to Indonesian literature and the melding of humour, extreme events, folklore
and reality is done with a nice balance.
For my full review,
including how I came across this work, and a few notes from the Melbourne
Writer’s Festival revisit my original post here.
Review copy from New
Directions Publishing.
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