Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

July 15, 2017
Pulp fiction from one of Indonesia's most important young writers.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. The carnage and acts of sexual assault in the first book were starkly depicted, but they were also imbued with a fabulist sensibility. The author was exploring the violent history of his country through a folkloric lens and using the language and modes of pop culture to make it immediate. He seems to be trying to do something similar here, but the results are much closer to Man Tiger (2015) than to the earlier work. Both latter novels are spare and quick rather than epic, and the fact that they're short, at least, is good. The protagonist of this latest book is a young man whose impotence is his most defining feature. Ajo Kiwar's flaccid penis is both a private struggle and a public fact. There are many scenes of Ajo Kiwar trying to rouse his flaccid penis and many moments in which he talks to and consults with his flaccid penis. Ajo Kiwar's flaccid penis is the first thing that comes to the minds of his friends and acquaintances when they think of him, and it is the subject of much of the book's dialogue. 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.

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Starred review from September 4, 2017
Kurniawan (Beauty Is a Wound) tells the ribald, noir-inflected, and oddly epic story of a man’s quest to regain his sexual virility. Teenage Javanese roughneck Ajo Kawir loses the use of his “little bird” after witnessing the rape of a widow by two soldiers. He tries everything to revive it: prostitutes, rubbing it with chili pepper, even getting it stung by bees. He is only kept from chopping off the offending member with an axe by the intervention of his friend. But it becomes a matter of honor after a brilliant martial artist named Iteung, a member of the criminal syndicate known as the Empty Hand, beats him senseless in protection of her boss and he falls in love with her. Ajo Kawir’s work interferes with their romance: he’s an enforcer for the unsavory Uncle Bunny and is assigned to murder a famous killer known only as the Tiger. After being imprisoned for his crimes for a number of years, Ajo Kawir takes a job as a truck driver and becomes mentor to a younger man named Gaptooth Mono, who must face his own archenemy—and all the while Iteung dreams of killing the soldiers who forever deprived Ajo Kawir of his erection. This is an almost unbelievably fun and weird novel.

August 1, 2017

Ajo Kawir has the worst imaginable problem for a teenage boy: he cannot get an erection. But Indonesian writer Kurniawan, who came to prominence here and worldwide with the sensational Beauty Is a Wound, isn't delivering a smarmy sex comedy. Instead, he links his protagonist's impotence to pervasive male violence. Joining a friend to spy on a crazy woman with a beautiful body, Ajo Kawir witnesses her horrific rape by two policemen and thereafter cannot get it up, philosophically discussing the situation with his limp member and wondering what it's trying to teach him. He sublimates his rage by fighting, for which he becomes renowned--he's even contracted to kill the notorious thug, the Tiger--but on one mission he meets Iteung, a young woman who learned martial arts to stave off sexual predation and proves to be as spectacular a fighter as he is. They fall deeply in love, though the road to happiness isn't easy, and Iteung demonstrates her fighting worth in a propulsive narrative that unsparingly, almost jauntily, describes how men pound one another as a way to live. VERDICT Not on the grand scale of Beauty Is a Wound, this intense, unsettling slice-of-life read is somehow less grim than illuminating. Not light reading but not just for literati. [See Prepub Alert, 2/27/17.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2017

Shooting-star Indonesian author Kurniawan made his English-language debut in 2015 to considerable acclaim with the laceratingly beautiful Beauty Is a Wound, and his next work has the same raw feel. Ajo Kawir is a lower-class Javanese teenager whose rampant interest in sex is blunted when he sees two policemen brutally rape a deranged woman and tries to channel his frustrations by fighting. Kurniawan smartly plays with pop culture tropes as he investigates male violence and political repression; sophisticated readers must check out.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.