Certainly, allusions to internationally renowned authors were not entirely absent from Indonesian reviewers’ remarks when Beauty is a Wound was first published in 2002. Others have also detected notes of Faulkner, of Twain, of Gogol and Melville.
Alighting on the novels’ fantastic elements, most critics have drawn parallels with Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie. What I have found particularly interesting is that reviewers have consistently described Eka (who prefers to be called so) in terms of other world literary ‘greats’. Not since Pramoedya Ananta Toer has an Indonesian writer received this kind of attention from the international literary community. As a scholar and translator of modern Indonesian literature, I was naturally thrilled. Beauty is a Wound made it into the New York Times’ annual list of the top 100 notable books for 2015. When the English-language editions of Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound and Man Tiger were published last year, they were greeted with great critical acclaim.