Indonesia: Beauty is a Wound

Beauty is a Wound by Eka Kurniawan is a magical-realist centered on Indonesia in the years after Suharto’s fall in 1998. It opens with the main character emerging from her grave to check up on what’s happened to her daughters and grandchildren, and it’s not pretty. The family is dealing with a lot of drama, and the story takes us back to the 1920s, when the Dutch colonial government ran things, through the Japanese occupation and into the fits and starts of independence. Although it would probably help to know a lot more about the history of West Java than I did when I started this book, I loved it. It’s one of the big, meaty books that I’ve conquered since the pandemic gave us the gift of free time (and existential dread, and endless tedium).

In financial circles, Indonesia is known for being the fastest-growing market for Islamic financial services and ground zero for the 1998 Asian financial crisis that very much contributed to Suharto’s overthrow.  It has the fourth-largest population and the seventh-largest GDP in the world, according to the CIA World Factbook. It could be turn into a force over the next century, but it has challenges—not least of which is being an archipelago nation in an era of rising oceans.

Most Americans know Indonesia for travel, especially the trope of backpackers hanging out on beaches or discovering romance in an exotic land. But, of course, it’s far more complicated than that. The economy is exploitive, as people in economic circles say: it relies on agriculture, oil, and mineral resources that are at odds with visions of leafy beauty. I’m anxiously awaiting the verdict, but it will take another 25 or 50 years to know.