It’s all very skillfully done, but it can be a bit overwhelming, as when you take both the cake and the pie at the buffet, or when you go somewhere — the rain forest, the Louvre — where too much is going on at once.
In addition to a delightful irreverence toward religion, Kurniawan has an unsettling way of stirring the supernatural into the quotidian: Gravediggers get possessed by the spirits of the dead, tigers live inside people, pigs turn into human beings...
Beauty Is a Wound wants, at one level, to remember what happened and, in the process, restore dignity to those tortured and killed. Yet in spite of the immense brutality depicted in the novel, there are no one-dimensional oppressors...
