The semi-comic, pulp-y framing lures readers into what becomes a poignant exploration of an adolescent mind lurching toward maturity ... If the fable-esque set-up seems a bit heavy-handed, Kurniawan avoids that pitfall by wrapping his tale in warmth and candor. He captures the tender rationale of teens in the swell of adolescent transformation, showing (through the character of Gecko, who gladly loans his father to his friend) how intuitively empathetic young people can be toward each other ... . Kurniawan confidently drops in details without explaining them, sets readers down in medias res, and presents dream sequences as though they’re real, always shifting gears with ease. It’s to his credit (and to Annie Tucker’s simple but vibrant translation) that his experiments don’t create reader whiplash.

Eka Kurniawan is the Quentin Tarantino of Indonesian literature: a brash wunderkind, delivering gleeful references to pulp fiction, lashings of stylized violence, and an array of characters and scenarios that far surpass the tropes and clichés which inspire them. But as with Quentin Tarantino, one might occasionally wonder just how much substance lies beneath the indisputably stylish surface ... The vignette structure also lets Kurniawan switch rapidly back and forth between different times and places, allowing him to develop a nifty technique of describing an event and its origins in tandem ... All of this is tremendous fun, even if the brutality is sometimes a little hard to stomach ... Perhaps it is best simply to take it like a Tarantino movie: as a sort of bravura, X-rated pantomime, delivered with style and panache by an author who knows he can get away with just about anything. And as high-end pulp fiction, Vengeance is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is superb.

Kurniawan’s novels demonstrate a similar ideology to The Handmaid’s Tale; while Margaret Atwood excavates a dystopic future, Kurniawan does the same to Indonesia’s past and present. The misogynistic structures and worldviews that pervade society inevitably manifest in destructive ways, and when they can, the women persevere, though it couldn’t and shouldn’t be expected of them ... Advancing the idea that the crimes and violence of the powerful is difficult to fight against because of its invisibility is, in itself, a political argument, though it’s not particularly well fleshed out in the book. Without a clear group or institution against which she’s fighting, it becomes violence for violence’s sake alone ... Witnessing and recognizing extreme violence has value, but Vengeance Is Mine struggles with countenancing some violent acts while condemning others ... Despite Vengeance Is Mine’s consistent bloodshed, it’s a very funny book. The humor is dry; Kurniawan is a master at twisting a sentence just right ...Perhaps to its detriment, it is often fun to read, and despite its relative brevity, it is a deeply ambitious book, which makes it equally thrilling and unsatisfying. Vengeance Is Mine has many brilliant moments. But up against the achievements of his first two translated novels, this one feels a little, well, flaccid.

There is little change of register in the switch from comic to tragic material; the writing is dispassionate and matter-of-fact, without wasting any time on hand-wringing. The many scenes of combat in the book, however, are gleeful and cartoonish ... At times it’s more like reading a treatment for a Tarantino film than a novel, complete with jump cuts and temporal juxtapositions; three styles spliced together, by turns a soft porn flick, a manic road thriller and a martial arts movie ... Ajo’s impotence and his reaction to it could be intended as a metaphor for Indonesia’s lower classes, assailed by corruption, unmanned by poverty, with no recourse except recreational and by extension political violence. His bodily quietude fosters a sense of otherworldly calm in Ajo for a while. But it seems religion is not the answer either. It’s a blast of a book, by turns beguiling, horrifying and silly. Whether or not a political fable is intended, the squelch of blood and the crack of breaking bones tends to muffle any deeper message.

The novel’s drama unfolds in a series of short vignettes, each of which comes packed with larger-than-life characters, lurid thoughts and graphic deeds ... Vengeance Is Mine is clearly not for the faint-hearted. However, Mr Kurniawan offsets the carnage and lightens the mood with skew-whiff logic and humour that ranges from slapstick to ribald to pitch-black. At other key intervals he utilises the mayhem to expose and examine more serious concerns such as corruption and injustice. There is the occasional priapic silliness and the title is unwieldy if not awful. Still, it is hard not to be caught up by the book’s bold ideas and rambunctious energy.

Beauty Is a Wound (2015), Kurniawan’s English-language debut, was vast in scope and boldly executed. It was rude and brutal, but it was also funny and beautiful. This newly translated novel is simply rude and brutal ... Even when he’s at his best, character development is not one of Kurniawan’s strengths. The mythic qualities of Beauty Is a Wound made up for this lack of depth; the characters there were real people but also archetypes and figures from fairy tales. Ajo Kiwar is just flat and uninteresting, and none of the other characters are much more compelling—not even the sexy lady bodyguard who falls in love with him after they beat each other soundly. There’s a lot of rape in this novel, and it feels even more gratuitous than many murders. Tedious, and unpleasantly so.

...[a] ribald, noir-inflected, and oddly epic story of a man’s quest to regain his sexual virility ... This is an almost unbelievably fun and weird novel.