Eka Kurniawan's "Kitchen Curse"

Inventive premises, bold experimentation, sly humor, political parables about the relationships between the individual and the Indonesian authorities, and between men and women. The storytelling puts an ironic distance between the storyteller and his characters, and so the reader feels his or her own distance from them too. The result, for me at least, is a sense of respect, but not of warm admiration nor of profound connection.

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