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Kitchen Curse:Stories
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The acclaimed, Man Booker International nominated novelist’s first book of short stories
Hailed as a Southeast Asian Gabriel García Márquez for the exuberant beauty of his prose and the darkly comic surrealism of his stories, Eka Kurniawan is the first Indonesian writer to be nominated for a Man Booker International Prize. Here is his first collection of short stories to be translated into English.
A man captures a caronang, a strange, intelligent dog that walks upright, and brings it home, only to provoke an all-too-human outcome. A girl plots against a witch doctor whose crimes against her are, infuriatingly, like any other man’s. Stories explore the turbulent dreams of an ex-prostitute, a perpetual student, victims of anti-communist genocide, an elephant, a stone. Dark, sexual, scatalogical, violent, and mordantly funny, these fractured fables span city and country, animal and human, myth and politics.
Reviews
Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be South-East Asia’s most ambitious writer in a generation...
Kurniawan creates a vivid sense of poverty and rural isolation and weaves magic realism into his narratives to terrific effect. It’s easy to see why he is being compared to Gabriel García Márquez and hailed as one of the leading lights of contemporary Indonesian fiction.
Kurniawan’s writing demonstrates an affinity with literary heavyweights such as, yes, García Márquez and Dostoevsky, as well as Indonesia’s own social-realist master Pramoedya Ananta Toer, to whom domestic fans have dubbed him an heir. Most intriguing, though, is the influence of the home-grown pulp fiction that was popular when he was growing up in West Java
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Many have deemed Kurniawan the next Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an acclaimed pioneer of socialist realism. The observation is inevitable, given the paucity of well-known Indonesian literary voices. But, unlike Pramoedya, Kurniawan eschews political conviction for a knowing ambivalence.
New Yorker -
Indonesia’s most original living writer of novels and short stories, and its most unexpected meteorite. Who could predict the arrival of Sophocles, Virgil, Lady Murasaki, Cervantes, Melville, Lu Hsün, Shakespeare, Proust, Gogol, Ibsen, Márquez, or Joyce?
, New Left Review -
These stories are blasphemous, perverse, and shocking! But so are you, if you’re a human being. With exceptional fervor, wit, and bite, Kurniawan faces the truth. Can you?
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These short, spiky tales are a joy to read.
New Internationalist -
Scintillating and often darkly humorous, Kitchen Curse by Eka Kurniawan is masterful take on the vicissitudes of life for contemporary Indonesians.
Asian Review of Books -
Like Beauty Is a Wound, Man Tiger is a tale of generations bound by tragedy and burdened by unspeakable histories. But it also reveals the banality of violence that has turned routine. Kurniawan suggested to an audience at the Melbourne festival that unpredictable outbreaks of violence were part of the fabric of Indonesian life. As a teenager, he saw a mob set two men on fire after the men tried to steal a guitar from a minibus.
New Yorker -
Tight, focused and thrilling... Like a good crime novel, Man Tiger works best when read in a single sitting, and its propulsive suspense is all the more remarkable because Kurniawan reveals both victim and murderer in the first sentence.
New York Times -
Sex, violence, and betrayal loom large throughout, as in Kurniawan's award-winning previous novels.
Library Journal -
Erupting with awareness and dark wit, this work puts Kurniawan in league with Hassan Blasim, Witold Gombrowicz, and Daniil Kharms.
Publishers Weekly -
These stories are sites of bold experimentation ... They provide ways of looking at Indonesia’s politics, history, and culture through the lens of the everyday and the marginal: the world of the outcasts.
, Singapore Unbound