Kitchen Curse: Stories

by Eka Kurniawan, Annie Tucker (Translator), Benedict Anderson (Translator), Maggie Tiojakin (Translator), Tiffany Tsao (Translator)

Overview

Nominated for the Man Booker International, Eka Kurniawan brings his short stories into English for the first time

Eka Kurniawan’s freewheeling imagination explores the turbulent dreams of an ex-prostitute, the hapless life of a perpetual student, victims of an anticommunist genocide, the travails of an elephant, even the vengeful fantasies of a stone. Dark, sexual, scatological, violent, and mordantly funny, these fractured fables span city and country, animal and human, myth and politics.

Like nothing else, Kurniawan’s stories bury themselves in the mind. His characters and insights are at once hauntingly familiar, peculiar, and twisted.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781786637154
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	10/01/2019
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	641,682
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Eka Kurniawan was born in Tasikmalaya, Indonesia, in 1975. He has published several novels, including Beauty Is a Wound and Man Tiger, as well as many short stories. He is a recipient of the Prince Claus Award and has been named a Foreign Policy Global Thinker.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/16/2019

Kurniawan’s deadpan, incisive collection (after the novel Beauty Is a Wound) pares out the gruesome consequences of acting on misconceptions. In “Making an Elephant Happy,” childhood innocence becomes deadly, while in “Peter Pan,” a revolutionary rejects his privilege to become a martyr. “Caronang” offers a new twist on the timeless tale of man’s misguided impulse to tame a wild beast—in this case, a canine creature with opposable thumbs that is native to Indonesia, stands bolt upright, and is cute as a “living doll” until it learns to shoot a gun. Each sardonic entry is made more alluring by the reliance on a mythic plot device—an amulet made of otter, a stone with a narrative point of view. The accumulation of bathroom scrawls in “Graffiti in the Toilet,” each more blindly ecstatic than the last, encapsulates Kurniawan’s interest in how the human drive to make one’s mark often paves over good intentions. Erupting with awareness and dark wit, this work puts Kurniawan in league with Hassan Blasim, Witold Gombrowicz, and Daniil Kharms. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

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?”
—James Hannaham, author of Delicious Foods

“These stories show how we are laid bare to the chaos, mysteries and powers of all kinds of other beings, and how we have always continued to resist, and to simply live.”
—Khairani Barokka, author of Rope

“These short, spiky tales are a joy to read.”
—New Internationalist

“Brash, worldly and wickedly funny, Eka Kurniawan may be South-East Asia’s most ambitious writer in a generation … Eka is shaping up to be [Indonesia’s] Murakami: approaching social concerns at an angle rather than head-on, with hefty doses of surrealism and wry humour.”
—Economist

“It’s easy to see why [Kurniawan] is being compared to Gabriel García Márquez and hailed as one of the leading lights of contemporary Indonesian fiction.”
—Financial Times

“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.”
—Guardian

“Many have deemed Kurniawan the next Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an acclaimed pioneer of socialist realism.”
—New Yorker

“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

“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 (Starred Review)

“The Indonesian writer’s short story collection tells tales of hope and disappointment from Reformasi, the period following the ouster of the country’s dictator Suharto. In Kitchen Curse, the act of storytelling becomes a way of reimagining the means through which the political finds expression.”
—Noah Flora, Nation

“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.”
—Intan Paramaditha, Singapore Unbound

From the Publisher

2019-07-15
Little fables of degradation from one of Indonesia's most famous authors.

Kurniawan earned international acclaim for his epic exploration of his country's history and folklore, Beauty Is a Wound (2015). This was the author's first work to be published in English, and translations of his novels that have appeared since then have been increasingly disappointing. The short fictions collected in this volume continue that unfortunate trend. Kurniawan has never been afraid to shy away from the grotesque and the squalid, but, with stories like "Graffiti in the Toilet" and "Don't Piss Here," he seems to be daring readers to look away. More importantly, these very brief tales seem to be gross for the sake of being gross. The violence and filth and sexual transgression in Beauty Is a Wound served a larger purpose in depicting a country with a complicated, troubled past and contemporary political and economic challenges. To the extent that there is a hint of substantive content, it's difficult to discern how much of it will be of interest only to an Indonesian audience. For example, the story "Rotten Stench" describes—in one seven-page sentence—a massacre in the fictional city of Halimunda that echoes a similar atrocity that occurred 18 years earlier. It's sickening, certainly, and the structural choice Kurniawan makes propels us forward even when we might want to stop, and one might make the argument that the author's decision to provide almost no context for these scenes of chickens picking at the genitals of corpses (the word "genitals" appears a lot in these stories) and "flesh and blood that had congealed into porridge" suggests a certain nauseating universality, but…how many readers will understand the barely enumerated distinctions between these two massacres, and how many need a graphic lesson in why mass murder is, generally speaking, bad?

Crude and pointless—unless crudity is the point.

Kirkus Reviews