Review | Eka Kurniawan’s brutal novel on Indonesian masculinity is not for the faint-hearted

Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash
by Eka Kurniawan
Pushkin Press

Eka Kurniawan first ignited international interest in 2015, with the English translation of his 2004 novel, Man Tiger. By the time it hit the Man Booker Prize longlist in 2016, the first novel by an Indonesian author to do so, he had been likened to Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie, and pronounced the heir to Indonesian literary icon Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

But if critics were ecstatic in their praise of Man Tiger , the first English translation of Kurniawan’s extraordinary 2002 debut, Beauty Is a Wound – a 498-page epic released a few months after Man Tiger – sent them into overdrive, with The Economist declaring that Kurniawan “may be Southeast Asia’s most ambitious writer in a generation”.

Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash (2014), the third of Kurniawan’s novels to be translated, is a world apart in scale, complexity and ambition from Beauty Is a Wound, which entwined Indonesia’s history with the story of a prostitute who returns from the dead.

At just 208 pages, Vengeance Is Mine proffers a sly, sideways glance at Indonesian society and packs an audaci­ous punch all of its own. Described by its publisher as “gloriously pulpy”, it’s not for the faint-hearted.

From its opening sentence – “‘Only guys who can’t get hard fight with no fear of death,’ Iwan Angsa once said of Ajo Kawir” – Kurniawan provokes, titillates and confounds as he examines masculinity in the guise of a man suffering from impotence.