Book review: Eka Kurniawan’s second novel Man Tiger is arresting and lyrical
The Indonesian author of Beauty Is a Wound takes a story of murder and relates it through a distinctly Javanese sensibility
by Eka Kurniawan
Verso Books
Indonesian author Eka Kurniawan’s first novel Beauty Is a Wound has already been compared to Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie – it is long, it recounts the history of an “exotic” country and it is studded with supernatural happenings, so never mind that Kurniawan is bawdy where García Márquez is plangent, or that his occasional direct addresses to the reader owe more to oral storytelling than to postmodernism. Such lofty comparisons might threaten to obscure the writing itself. It is lucky, then, that his books so far are so distinct and memorable.
Where Beauty Is a Wound is sprawlingly expansive, Man Tiger is slender and taut, with the central supernatural element given relatively little page time and the nation’s history collapsed into oblique glimpses: the rusting samurai swords left behind from the Japanese colonial period and the increase in “private” violence, an apparent symptom of living in “a republic no longer at war”.