Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash

by Eka Kurniawan, Annie Tucker (Translator)

Overview

Vivid, bawdy, comic, and arresting, the exciting new novel by the Indonesian phenomenon, Eka Kurniawan

Told in short, cinematic bursts, Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is gloriously pulpy. Ajo Kawir, a lower-class Javanese teenage boy excited about sex, likes to spy on fellow villagers in flagrante, but one night he ends up witnessing the savage rape of a beautiful crazy woman by two policemen. Deeply traumatized, he becomes impotent. His efforts to get his virility back all fail, and Ajo Kawir turns to fighting as a way to vent his frustrations. He gets such a fearsome reputation as a brawler that he is hired to kill a thug named The Tiger, but instead Ajo Kawir falls in love with Iteung, a gorgeous female bodyguard who works for the local mafia. Alas, the course of true love never did run smooth… Fast-forward a decade. Now a truck driver, Ajo Kawir has reached a new equanimity, thinking that his penis may be trying to teach him a lesson and even consulting it in many situations as if it were his guru—love may yet triumph.

Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash shows Eka Kurniawan in a gritty, comic, pungent mode that fans of Quentin Tarantino will appreciate. But even with its liberal peppering of fights, high-speed car chases, and ladies heaving with desire, the novel continues to explore Kurniawan’s familiar themes of female agency in a violent male world dominated by petty criminals and a corrupt police state.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811225649
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	08/01/2017
Pages:	216
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

The internationally acclaimed author of Beauty Is a Wound, Eka Kurniawan was born in West Java in 1975, the day that the little ex-Portuguese colony East Timor declared its sovereign independence. His work has been translated into thirty-five languages and he has been acclaimed the “literary child of Günter Grass, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie” (The New York Review of Books). Le Monde has suggested that in the future, Nobel jurors may award him the prize “that Indonesia has never received.”

Annie Tucker’s translation of Beauty is a Wound was a New York Times Notable Book of 2015, longlisted for the 2016 Best Translated Book Award, a 2016 Man Booker International Prize finalist, and the winner of the 2016 World Reader’s Award.

Editorial Reviews

"Kurniawan tells the ribald, noir-inflected, and oddly epic story of a man’s quest to regain his sexual virility...This is an almost unbelievably fun and weird novel."— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"The physicality of his prose and his story is invigorating."— The Paris Review

"Political and profound, even though it uses language drawn from pulp fiction and popular movies. Kurniawan tells a story about injustice, the limits of revenge and the redemptive power of love."— Caravan

"A tragicomedy Indonesian thriller... By turns a soft porn flick, a manic road thriller and a martial arts movie... A blast of a book"— Financial Times

"A potent blend of grounded realism and flighty fantasy... a pulpy, visceral tale of sex, violence and comeuppance"— The Economist

"Dark, sexually charged and subversive comedy..."— Claire Fallon Huffington Post

"The best action-packed crime comedy about murder for hire and male impotence you'll read this year!"— Keaton Patterson Brazos Bookstore

From the Publisher

2017-07-04
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.

Kirkus Reviews