Exuberant, funny, crackling with energy and invention The Times Annie Tucker's skilful translation captures Kurniawan's matter-of-fact prose and black humour. Elements of the supernatural and oral storytelling combine powerfully to evoke a brutal past and some of the pivotal events that helped shape Indonesia today Financial Times Magical realism to rival that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez Independent An unforgettable, all-encompassing epic... This is an astounding, momentous book Publishers Weekly (starred review) An epic picaresque that's equal parts Canterbury Tales and Mahabharata?exuberantly excessive and captivating. Huge ambition, abundantly realized Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) Kurniawan's story of an undead woman had morphed into the story of modern Indonesia, an epic novel critics are more wont to compare to One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Canterbury Tales Sydney Morning Herald It's an astonishing, polyphonic epic, a melange of satire, grotesquerie, and allegory that incorporates everything from world history to local folk talks Brooklyn Magazine The final wonder of Beauty Is a Wound is how much pure liveliness and joy there is mixed up with the pain, as if the verdancy of the author's imagination was racing to cover a million corpses with fresh green tendrils The Saturday Paper Kurniawan is a brilliant writer, creating fascinating images and characters, spinning wild and magical tales Universe in Words (blog) It felt like a breath of fresh air. It was an enjoyable read and rather amazing The Book Castle (blog) A literary child of Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Salman Rushdie The New York Review of Books Scatological, scandalous, lively, beautiful and dark and messed up and fantastical. It's like One Hundred Years of Solitude kicked into another gear, with almost a punk sensibility housed within gorgeous writing-and stories coiled within stories within stories. One of the most brilliant things about the novel is how Kurniawan never loses the thread even when spinning so many tales at once
Jeff VanderMeer A Southeast Asian storyteller with a magnificent and effortless grasp of his material South China Morning Post Original and powerful... Maybe, who knows, the judges of the Nobel Prize could, in a few years, consider giving [Eka] the prize that Indonesia has never received Le Monde