Beauty is a Wound - General - no spoilers

[Hugh]

This is the general/background thread for May's group discussion on Beauty Is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan. Eka Kurniawan is an Indonesian writer, born in Java in 1975. Beauty is a Wound was his first novel, a magic realist epic that mixes traditional Javanese storytelling with Indonesia's bloody history since the early 20th century.

The book is vibrant but rather violent and also rather long, so I will forgive anyone who doesn't feel able to finish it. I will create the spoiler threads tomorrow.

Who will be joining me?

[♑︎♑︎♑︎]

I'm looking forward to reading this book with you, Hugh. I loved Man Tiger very much, which came out in the same year, but have never read this one.

[Hugh]

Thanks Lark - your thoughts will be very interesting.

[Monika]

I'm in!

I got the book somewhere in mid-april and I since then I had a hard time waiting to tell you about my, well astonishment maybe, that the book is advertised as "An Italian War Diary 1943-1944 (English Edition) on amazon.fr.
Somewhat disrepectful, don't you think so? I wasn't even sure I purchased the right book - turned out it was though

[Hugh]

Bea wrote: "I'm in!

I got the book somewhere in mid-april and I since then I had a hard time waiting to tell you about my, well astonishment maybe, that the book is advertised as "An Italian War Diary 1943-1..."
How strange - having finished the book yesterday I don't think there were any Italians in it, and although the war and Japanese occupation of Java play a part, it could never be mistaken for a diary.

[Monika]

I am easily affected by violent scenes as well, but here, they didn’t touch me too much. One reason is, that they appear so absurd. One other is that the way the author describes them reveals the stupidity of men and throughout the whole book I was left with the feeling that the victims are the strong ones. But to be honest, I don’t exactly know what to do with this impression, this glorification of survivors.

[Mark]

It's on hold for me, but I haven't got it yet. We'll see if it comes before the discussion wraps up...

[Hugh]

Mark wrote: "It's on hold for me, but I haven't got it yet. We'll see if it comes before the discussion wraps up..."
All of our book discussions remain open for contributions beyond the scheduled end date