{"product_id":"beauty-is-a-wound","title":"Beauty Is a Wound","description":"\u003cp\u003eThe epic novel Beauty Is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humour and romance in a sweeping saga. The novel begins with the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, then a Dutch colony, at the time of World War II. The beautiful half-Dutch, half-Indonesian prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawans gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nations troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million Communists, followed by three decades of Suhartos despotic rule. Beauty Is a Wound astonishes from its opening line: One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years . Drawing on local sources folk tales and the all-night shadow puppet plays, with their bawdy wit and epic scope and inspired by Melville and Gogol, Kurniawans distinctive voice brings something luscious yet astringent to contemporary literature.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Speaking Tiger","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45876149158086,"sku":"DADAX9385755684","price":7.19,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0695\/9389\/1014\/files\/91pXMvUhTaL.jpg?v=1779630776","url":"https:\/\/ergodemedia.com\/products\/beauty-is-a-wound","provider":"Ergodemedia","version":"1.0","type":"link"}