Biting and beautiful, the book’s mythical elements are grounded by grim accounts of Margio’s troubled family and its abusive patriarch, Komar bin Syueb. The world Kurniawan invents is familiar and unexpected, incorporating mystery, magical realism, and folklore. The frequent digressions are used effectively for characterization and provide a larger understanding of the events leading to Anwar’s death. It is conversational, cyclical, and tangential. The narrative is told in a style that evokes oral storytelling traditions. Kurniawan is a sly raconteur, and the easy flow of his prose shines in Sembiring’s translation. When Sadrah speaks with Margio at the police station, Margio reveals that he is not the killer-rather, Margio believes a ghostly ancestral tiger that lives inside his body committed the murder. However, Major Sadrah, the town’s only military commander, can’t find a motive. An angry young boar hunter named Margio initially confesses to the killing, and one of Anwar’s daughters, Maesa Dewi, witnessed Margio at the scene of the crime. Tragic and imaginative, the story begins with the murder of Anwar Sadat, a known womanizer in a rural Indonesian village. debut with this novel, along with the tour-de-force epic Beauty Is a Wound, also being published this fall.
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