Man Tiger

Starred review from July 27, 2015
Kurniawan makes his U.S. debut with this novel, along with the tour-de-force epic Beauty Is a Wound, also being published this fall. Tragic and imaginative, the story begins with the murder of Anwar Sadat, a known womanizer in a rural Indonesian village. An angry young boar hunter named Margio initially confesses to the killing, and one of Anwar’s daughters, Maesa Dewi, witnessed Margio at the scene of the crime. However, Major Sadrah, the town’s only military commander, can’t find a motive. When Sadrah speaks with Margio at the police station, Margio reveals that he is not the killer—rather, Margio believes a ghostly ancestral tiger that lives inside his body committed the murder. Kurniawan is a sly raconteur, and the easy flow of his prose shines in Sembiring’s translation. The narrative is told in a style that evokes oral storytelling traditions. It is conversational, cyclical, and tangential. The frequent digressions are used effectively for characterization and provide a larger understanding of the events leading to Anwar’s death. The world Kurniawan invents is familiar and unexpected, incorporating mystery, magical realism, and folklore. Biting and beautiful, the book’s mythical elements are grounded by grim accounts of Margio’s troubled family and its abusive patriarch, Komar bin Syueb. This wild and enthralling novel manages to entertain while offering readers insight into the traditions of a little-known South East Asian culture. Kurniawan has officially put the West on notice.

August 15, 2015
Newly translated work by the author of Beauty Is a Wound (2015). The story begins with the grisly murder of Anwar Sadat-not the Egyptian president assassinated in 1981 but, rather, a lazy and lascivious artist living in a small town on the Indian Ocean. The cause of death is no mystery: a young man named Margio is clearly guilty. What no one can figure out, though, is the boy's motive. Nor can they explain why Margio dispatched Anwar Sadat by ripping out the man's throat with his teeth. What nobody knows is that Margio wasn't quite himself when he attacked Anwar Sadat; Margio was, instead, possessed by a white tiger. This is the second of Kurniawan's novels to be published this year, and it shares a number of similarities with its predecessor. The first and most obvious is the porous boundary between the natural and the supernatural. Another is the way in which the author borrows formal elements from folklore and oral tradition. But, where Beauty Is a Wound is sprawling and disorderly, this novel is succinct and disciplined. This evolution in style doesn't work to the book's benefit, though. The narrator's voice is gossipy and close to the action-often the case in folklore-but the characters are almost never allowed to speak for themselves. And, although the story begins in medias res, the bulk of the book is a retrospective account of events leading up to the murder. Both stylistic choices keep the reader from getting close to Margio, Anwar Sadat, and their tragically intertwined families. And Kurniawan's commitment to economy means that potentially fascinating episodes-like Margio's decision to join the circus in order to learn from the tiger tamers-are reduced to a sentence or two. The readers most likely to be disappointed are those intrigued by the paranormal creature promised by the title: tiger sightings are few and far between. Lackluster effort from a talented young author.

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