Vengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash Paperback – August 1, 2017

This is one of the greatest books I've read. I often indulge in books that seem to confound and confuse others. Most of the time it pays off. This one sure did. For lovers of magical realism this is a strange but loveable tangent to it. For fans of Mark Helprin, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Murakami and even Mark Twain this book will be comfortable as an old raincoat. This reading lives on the same shelf as Brothers, Coin Locker Babies or Red Sorghum. The flavor of Indonesia infused with a hallucinogenic haze, the nearly insane premise of the story guides you through the jungles to a profound human experience.

it's not your typical read, because it's uniquely dark side indonesia. I had seen the book review from the economist and decided to read it. It kept me entertained over a few nights.

I’m 100% not the target audience of this book. I don’t like revenge fantasies and I don’t like penises. I also don’t necessarily have the cultural context to relate to a book about Indonesian masculinity. But this book was a surprisingly entertaining read.

I'm in love with anything by Kurniawan. Ever since Beauty is a Wound, I've been looking for more English translations from him.

If you want to spend your reading time overloaded with face and limb smashing fights, truck drag races, wimpy sex, and discussions with an impotent penis, I guess you can waste your time with this one. The only reason to plow through it is for its portrait of the back-side of Indonesia.

3.5 starsVengeance Is Mine, All Others Pay Cash is the third novel by award-winning Indonesian author, Eka Kurniawan to be translated into English. In his early teens, Ajo Kawir witnesses a vicious assault which renders him impotent. Thereafter, he takes out his frustrations on anyone nearby who’s willing to fight. When he happens on Iteung, a tough fighter who is also a beautiful girl, his life changes: he’s fallen in love. But surely Iteung will not want an impotent husband?Fast forward eleven years, and Ajo the ex-con is driving trucks for a living, avoiding all fighting and living a peaceful life. His kenek, a kid called Gaptooth Mono, has other ideas, however. And the stowaway in his truck, Jelita, there’s something about her…Kurniawan gives the reader an original plot while managing to include a good helping of black humour, plenty of irony, corruption and a man who talks to his penis (which occasionally answers him). He easily conveys the Javanese village, the truck stop, and the male teen mindset. Readers should be aware that there is quite a lot of explicit sex as well as a surfeit of violent fights and dangerous truck driving and the plot necessitates frank discussion of genital organs. Some readers may find the erratic punctuation (quote marks often present for dialogue, but not always), and the switches between time periods, irritating. It is flawlessly translated from Indonesian by Annie Tucker. Funny and a bit crazy.

I'd never heard of Eka Kurniawan before I stumbled upon this wacky book but I certainly plan to read all of his other work as soon as I can get my hands on them.

This book just starts off bad; I couldn't get past Chapter 1. I found the writing/dialogue to be beyond juvenile (even for young characters like these). From the start, I could not related to these guys or their situation. I see this as a bad attempt at pulp fiction writing and it's too bad because with a title like this one, I was hoping for a fun an unforgettable adventure. If I can't return it, I will donate it; maybe someone else will see this book differently.

A violent and sexy fairy tale for adults, a love story, a story where religion does not exist despite being Indonesian and because of this even more of a fairy tale.

takes you out of your narrow cultural comfort zone!

OK, its easy to read and it skips by like a buzzing fly. But it’s slight and shallow - a text-only version of a teenage fantasy comic.Remarkable - and typical - that so many critics went overboard: ‘a literary child of Gunter Grass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie’, gushed the New York Review of Books; ‘An astounding, momentous book’, opined Publishers Weekly.The novel is imaginative, visceral and full of sex and violence - but populated entirely by cardboard characters and with a central story (about a boy’s pecker refusing to perform) which seems to have charmed our facile reviewers.The strongest element in this slight tale is the background sense of endemic casual brutality in contemporary Indonesia, which may or may not be representative of life in that sprawling archipelago.Kurniawan is successful, however, at splitting up the narration into emotionally coherent short chunks which are not always in chronological order. This gives the book an immediacy and edgy feel which the otherwise fairly conventional story lacks.

Characters with complex lives vividly imagined and believably told. Subtle story telling allowing the plot to slowly and warmly envelope you

ok