Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash
-
-
5.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kurniawan (Beauty Is a Wound) tells the ribald, noir-inflected, and oddly epic story of a man's quest to regain his sexual virility. Teenage Javanese roughneck Ajo Kawir loses the use of his "little bird" after witnessing the rape of a widow by two soldiers. He tries everything to revive it: prostitutes, rubbing it with chili pepper, even getting it stung by bees. He is only kept from chopping off the offending member with an axe by the intervention of his friend. But it becomes a matter of honor after a brilliant martial artist named Iteung, a member of the criminal syndicate known as the Empty Hand, beats him senseless in protection of her boss and he falls in love with her. Ajo Kawir's work interferes with their romance: he's an enforcer for the unsavory Uncle Bunny and is assigned to murder a famous killer known only as the Tiger. After being imprisoned for his crimes for a number of years, Ajo Kawir takes a job as a truck driver and becomes mentor to a younger man named Gaptooth Mono, who must face his own archenemy and all the while Iteung dreams of killing the soldiers who forever deprived Ajo Kawir of his erection. This is an almost unbelievably fun and weird novel.
