Indonesian Eka Kurniawan takes us on a sweeping ride through murky past centuries, years of Dutch colonial rule, through wartime suffering and beyond in his vast and ambitious 2002 novel, Beauty is a Wound.
With an award-winning English translation newly printed, this work is accessible to a much wider audience for the first time.
Combining the magical, mythical, historical and cultural, it uses humour and poignancy in equal measure, with a focus on outrageous, lewd and improbable scenarios.
The story opens satirically with heavy biblical overtones when the not completely likeable Dewi Ayu rises from her grave, hair shimmering like black lichen in a riverbed, and wanders off ''like someone staggering away from a bullfight''.
With a collection of three tiresomely beautiful daughters she is bored by life and longs for some variation, being thus rewarded with the ironically named fourth, Beauty, the most complete antithesis.
The proceeding decades follow the escapades of these women, and the various menfolk with whom they become involved.
Primarily set in the fictional port town and military stronghold of Halimunda, we witness the fleeing of Dutch plantation owners and the demise of colonial rule; local guerrilla takeovers; women forced into wartime prostitution and subservience; and the very palpable threat of Japanese domination, which became reality.
Kurniawan, and his images in translation, are searingly powerful: Pearl Harbour as an instance shows that ''... war was now very close, creeping like a lizard in the grass, slowly but surely covering the face of the earth with blood and bullet casings''.
There are fierce and legendary wartime generals, crazed and babbling old men, a guru by the name of Master Chisel, and ghosts who appear as headless sweet-potato sellers.
A military posse clutches sabres, samurai swords, spears, iron clubs and the like in frequent confrontation.
The natural landscape likewise pervades Kurniawan's rich descriptions: of cocoa and coconut plantations, and of guava, sapodilla and ambarella trees; names that carry the essence of the exotic.
Beauty is a Wound is exceedingly lengthy, however, at around 500 pages.
With several characters who dominate the journey as stock characters, by the second half of this work it at times struggles to sustain itself.
More depth to the characters, or more momentum driving the plot forward would aid an otherwise impressive work which paints an evocative and ghostly portrayal of mythical and historical times past.
• Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.
