I suppose one could say Eka Kurniawan’s Cantik Itu Luka is a dash of Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and Jose Saramago’s The Death of Ricardo Reis. Minus the magic realism, for the in these parts, folklore and magic really takes place. Here, magic itself is real, and the real absurd.
But it is unjust to judge a book by recognizing only its influences. If in Marquez we hear repetitive names and their countless offsprings bearing the same name doomed to repeat the same mistakes, here we have the daughters of Dewi Ayu, doomed to bear the same tragic fate because of their mother’s stubbornness (or is it just an act of wanting to fulfill an irony?)
Yet is is hard not to love her, because she remains single-handedly the most enigmatic character in the novel.
perkaraperkara 