Portrait of a nation
Eka Kurniawan’s “Beauty Is a Wound” is a powerful engine of storytelling. It churns out plot after plot, character after character, drawing from a seemingly endless fund of yarns and anecdotes and myths. It’s an acutely political novel, telling the story of Indonesia’s growth from an exploited Dutch colony to an ideologically riven young nation. Yet it’s also an acutely comic novel, by which I mean both that it is humorous in a bawdy, Rabelaisian way and that it displays the picaresque structure typical of the classic comic novel. (The book opens with an epigraph from the greatest instance of that genre, “Don Quixote.”)
All of this — the comedy and the historical heft, the intricate plot and even more intricate character system — should make for an overstuffed, elephantine novel. But it doesn’t. “Beauty Is a Wound,” the first of Kurniawan’s novels to be translated into English, is a controlled sprawl, massive but not messy. It is, especially at the level of structure, an awesome achievement.
It’s difficult to identify the protagonist or central plotline of “Beauty Is a Wound.” Novelistic attention is a zero-sum game: If one character and story gets x number of pages, then those pages can’t be given to other characters and stories. This is true of all fiction, but it’s especially true of multi-plot novels. Kurniawan knows this, and he seems to enjoy subverting our narrative expectations — drawing us into a story and then dancing away. In his ability to play with readerly attention, the Indonesian novelist resembles David Mitchell, whose “Cloud Atlas” performs a similarly deft game.
Despite its apparent ramblings, “Beauty Is a Wound” actually follows a regular pattern. Kurniawan will give us one plotline: say, the story of Dewi Ayu, a beautiful, intelligent and ambitious young woman who lives in the Indonesian town of Halimunda. During the Japanese occupation of World War II, Dewi is forced into prostitution. After the Japanese leave, she transforms herself into the “city’s favorite whore” — hobnobbing with political leaders, serving as a fashion template for the “virtuous ladies” whose husbands sleep with her.
Then, just as we’re settling into Dewi’s story, Kurniawan yanks us sideways into a different plotline: the story of Maman Gendeng, a bandit and romantic who journeys through the Indonesian countryside searching for Princess Rengganis, a legendary woman whose beauty “caused turmoil and disruptions” wherever she went. After much seeking, Maman Gendeng discovers that Princess Rengganis has been dead for hundreds of years; so much for that. Finding himself in Halimunda, he falls instead for Dewi, and it seems that the plot has come full circle.
But then a rival suitor intrudes: Shodancho, a brutal freedom fighter in the guerrilla war against the Japanese. Soon we’re in the midst of Shodancho’s story — smuggling, sexual violence and a campaign of pig extermination all play a part — only to be sidetracked when he meets a Communist agitator named Kliwon. Kliwon is another rival suitor, this time not for Dewi’s affections but for that of Alamanda, Dewi’s daughter. (Men transfer their affections from one woman to another with regularity in the novel.) Then we’re off with Kliwon’s story, leading up to the brutal purge of Communists that occurred in 1965-66 and led to the presidency of Suharto.
These moments of narrative transition — from Dewi to Maman Gendeng, from Maman Gendeng to Shodancho — often come right at the end of a chapter, and they give “Beauty Is a Wound” the feel of a serialized Victorian novel. Like those big, fat books, “Beauty Is a Wound” offers a totalizing view of society, approaching Indonesia through its history but also through its myths and folktales. (The novel features ghosts, resurrections and impenetrable chastity belts. Comparisons of Kurniawan to García Marquez and Rushdie are sure to follow.)
The vision that Kurniawan offers of Indonesia is frequently brutal, especially with regards to sexuality: Rape and the threat of rape are a constant drumbeat. Indeed, the novel’s title suggests that beauty, specifically feminine beauty, inevitably if unintentionally brings about its own violation. Dewi and her three beautiful daughters suffer greatly at the hands of men, and Dewi rejoices when her final daughter, named Beauty, turns out to look “like the result of randomly breeding a monkey with a frog and a monitor lizard.” But Kurniawan’s vision is also comic. Characters are forgiven even after they have done unspeakable things; if violence is constant, so is marriage and love.
As translated by Annie Tucker, Kurniawan’s prose is lucid and occasionally lyrical but never showy. We tend to associate literary ambition with stylistic ambition. Does the novel do something daring at the level of the sentence or image? That’s the question that critics, myself included, usually ask of a new novel. But such a question ignores the fact that there are other kinds of literary ambition — chief among them bold, complex storytelling. “Beauty Is a Wound” displays this kind of boldness in abundance, showing that intricate plotting can be its own form of literary experimentation.