Kitchen Curse

Eka Kurniawan, an Indonesian writer who has been nominated for the Man Booker International, appears here in English for the first time as a short story writer. The sixteen stories in this collection roam widely: an ex-prostitute's restless dreams, the unlucky existence of a student who never graduates, the victims of an anti-communist genocide, an elephant's troubles, and even the vengeful thoughts of a stone.

In the title story, Maharani visits her local museum hunting for old recipes, since her husband beats her for being a poor cook. She finds instead the tale of Diah Ayu, a peasant woman who became a Dutchman's mistress in colonial times. Maharani returns home no longer wanting to be a better wife. She wants out of the "kitchen curse" of domestic life, and she begins to plot her husband's murder. Elsewhere, "The Stone's Story" is an offbeat whodunit narrated by the stone used to drown a woman, which swears to avenge her. In "Don't Piss Here", a boutique owner named Sasha, fed up with the stench left by men relieving themselves outside her shop, stays up all night in the car park to catch them and stumbles on an unexpected sexual pleasure.

The stories are violent, bawdy, crude and bleakly funny, and they tend to stick in the memory. Kurniawan builds twisted fables that move between city and village, human and animal, myth and politics, with characters and insights that feel both strange and uncomfortably familiar. Readers should expect explicit sexual and violent material.