Man Tiger: A Novel

By Eka Kurniawan and Benedict Anderson

An unforgettable tale of literary magical realism from a critically acclaimed Indonesian writer who has been compared to Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mark Twain

Longlisted for the International Man Booker, this “supernatural tale of murder and desire fascinatingly subverts the crime fiction genre” as it tells the story of a half-man, half-magical female white tiger (Huffington Post).

A wry, affecting tale set in a small town on the Indonesian coast, Man Tiger tells the story of two interlinked and tormented families and of Margio, a young man ordinary in all particulars except that he conceals within himself a supernatural female white tiger. The inequities and betrayals of family life coalesce around and torment this magical being. An explosive act of violence follows, and its mysterious cause is unraveled as events progress toward a heartbreaking revelation.

Lyrical and bawdy, experimental and political, this extraordinary novel announces the arrival of a powerful new voice on the global literary stage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781781688618

Eka Kurniawan

Eka Kurniawan was born in Tasikmalaya, Indonesia in 1975. He studied philosophy at Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta and has since published several novels and short stories. The rights to Beauty is a Wound have now been sold in 27 territories. Love and Vengeance will be published by Pushkin Press in 2017.

Reviews for Man Tiger

[pwaites_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Trigger warning: rapeThere’s not a whole lot I like about Man Tiger. When you get right down to it, the only element I find intriguing is the structure. Maybe it’s just too literary for me?Man Tiger starts with a revelation that shakes a small, rural Indonesian community: Margio, a local youth, has murdered his neighbor Anwar Sadat. Instead of moving forward in a linear fashion, Man Tiger instead turns back in on itself, meandering through the past to explain everything that led to the murder.There is an element of the supernatural to Man Tiger – a female white tiger lives inside of Margio, and he claims it is she who committed the crime. However, Man Tiger is less fantasy and more magical realism. The supernatural elements play only a small role in the story, and the white tiger is more symbolic than anything else.The opening of the book made it look like it wouldn’t be involving female characters at all, but that turned out not to be the case. As the story moves on, the narrative focuses quite a bit on Margio’s mother and sister. However, I still feel like there was an odd amount of focus on the female characters breasts (what’s with repeatedly calling a young girl’s breasts “unripe”?). In this case, it could be an issue of the translation, but it was still enough to make me roll my eyes.The narrative of Man Tiger feels peculiarly detached. As a stylistic choice, it’s not my favorite. I prefer to get immersed in the narrative and emotions of the events. Man Tiger also ended up feeling tangential and bloated, despite being only a hundred and seventy pages long.I suspect that Man Tiger is aimed at a very different sort of reader than me. I’m sure it’s brimming with literary merit, but it reminded me more of a lackluster English class assignment than anything else. The Illustrated Page.

[kcshankd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Noir magical realism from Indonesia. The story fits and starts but eventually gets to where it is going, resolving nothing.

[si-876194 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Story of two families living in a small Indonesian coastal town whose lives are blighted by domestic violence. Long-listed for the International Man Booker Prize 2016, this is a short novel detailing the events lending up to a brutal murder. Involving story; the violence is described in stark matter of fact way which is tough to read - as it should be.The book is set in the present ( 1st published in 2004: translated into English in 2015) so Benedict Anderson's introduction is very helpful in explaining the political and financial situation of Indonesian.

[pomo58 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Man Tiger by Eka Kurniawan is a murder mystery (sorta) wrapped up in a mystical tale.This is one of those books that likely don't translate easily. I have a friend who read the original and when we discussed it it seemed like we had read different books. The elements are all here and the story is still compelling but to really capture a sense of magical realism the reader has to try to feel as much as read the story. I'm not sure how possible that truly is without having some outside input (in my case, my friend) to offer some insight.Having said all that I do still think this is a worthwhile read. The descriptions are quite good and the story still works, just with what seems to be repetition.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[brandiec-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Of the 68 reviews on Goodreads of Man Tiger, by Eka Kurniawan, only a handful are written in English by reviewers who do not also speak Indonesian. This is a shame because Man Tiger, and Kurniawan, deserve a wider audience. Verso Books is known primarily as the publisher of nonfiction works in such areas as cultural, literary, social, and political theory, and it has now expanded its expertise in translation to the world of fiction. Given its leftist slant, it is not surprising that Verso's newest fiction author comes from a part of the world which is all but forgotten by a majority of English-speaking readers, and it is to be applauded for publishing this fascinating peek at Indonesian village and family life.My concern is that Verso's radical left reputation may dissuade more politically and socially conservative readers from picking up Man Tiger. Kurniawan will hook them once they open the cover (which is itself quite eye-catching with four deep claw marks in its red-orange background), but first we have to get the book into their hands. I will be championing this book among my friends, and I hope readers of this review will join me.I received a free copy of Man Tiger through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[forsanolim · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

3.5 starsIn the opening of this book, we learn that one man has brutally murdered another. As the book explores the lead-up to this moment from several different angles, charting the deep and tragic relationships among members of an Indonesian family, we arrive at a fuller understanding of what has occurred, and why.This book was longlisted for the Man Booker International in 2016, and it's definitely a capital-L-Literary novel. With that said, I'm not sure that I'd say that I "enjoyed" it--it's definitely not a happy book. I wasn't really prepared for the darker content, especially the pretty graphic descriptions of violence and the domestic violence/sexual assault. I definitely think I see why this was done, and I think it was powerful, but I don't think that this is a sheer-enjoyment type of book.

[widsith_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This dreamy, meandering novel is written around a murder in a quiet Indonesian village, a crime whose victim and perpetrator are both given away in the opening sentence. Darting backwards and forwards in great swirls of flashbacks and foreshadowings, the story fills in the connections between the two characters and their families, gradually building up a kind of pointillist image of the town and the various tensions that led to the killing.The young man at the centre of the book is possessed by the spirit of a white tigress, and this flash of ‘magic-realism’ (a label I've always found rather irritating) has led some reviewers and blurbers to make hasty comparisons with García Márquez or even Rushdie. Actually this has nowhere near the same level of complexity or linguistic dexterity (at least in translation); but anyway, the magic realism angle seems to be a bit of a red herring, since the main value here is not in the fantasy elements but rather in the naturalistic portrait of Indonesian village life, a life of boar hunts with wild dogs, snakes in the allamanda trees, prayers in the surau, cockfights in the ruins of an abandoned railway station, and the quiet desperation of families running on routine domestic violence.What the novel illustrates, through its very sensitive portrayal of the two central families, is the way that violence within a family can scale up to violence within a community. For those with a little knowledge of Indonesian history, there may be an implicit invitation to scale up again, and make a connection with violence within the country as a whole. (Though politics is not mentioned directly, the region's history is present in various fossilised elements within the story, like the rusted samurai sword left over from the Japanese occupation that's being dragged around by the protagonist in the opening chapter.)The English translation from Labodalih Sembiring is excellent and reads extremely naturally, despite the fact that the world it describes is often quite an alien one. But the underlying emotions are as familiar as ever, and Kurniawan has found some beautiful new ways to get at the same old bittersweet wisdom: ‘All that remained was a precious lesson that love causes pain, and the conviction that it couldn't be otherwise.’