Beauty is Sorrow

The epic novel by Indonesian Eka Kurniawan is an amazing synthesis of history, myths, satire, family saga, romantic adventures, and magical realism. The life of the beautiful Devi Ayu and her four daughters is a series of horrifying, incredible, sensual, love-filled, insane, and touching episodes that come together to form one large story, filled with multiple meanings and levels. One May day, Devi Ayu rose from the grave where she had lain for twenty-one years, returned home, and sat at the table…

Thus begins one of the most astonishing novels of our time, in which echoes of Nikolai Gogol and Gabriel García Márquez, Mikhail Bulgakov and Herman Melville can be clearly heard. The story of Devi Ayu, the beauty of beauties, and her daughters, three of whom were even more beautiful than their mother, while the fourth was uglier than death, draws you into a whirlwind of strange and amazing events directly connected to the fate of Indonesia and the great epic "Mahabharata." Eka Kurniawan's prose is fresh and unusual; in modern world literature, it is a huge and bright phenomenon.