Mara finds herself brainstorming an ad campaign for Free Maxi Pads, with a little help from the menstruation-eating hag of her childhood. Jamal falls in love with the rich and powerful Bambang, but it is the era of the smiling general and his naivety might get him recruited to Bambang’s brutal cause. Solihin would give anything to make dangdut singer Salimah his wife — anything at all.
In the globally connected and fast-developing Indonesia of Apple and Knife, taboos, inversions, sex, and death all come together in a heady, intoxicating mix full of pointed critiques and bloody mutilations. Women carve out a place for themselves in this world, finding ways to subvert norms or enacting brutalities on themselves and each other.
Readers will receive new insights into life as a woman in Indonesian society — seemingly different from the mainstream Australian experience, but maybe not so different after all.
'Intan Paramaditha, who
mixes fairy tales and gothic ghost stories with feminist and political issues,
shakes up her readers, showing that her fiction is not beholden to a single
interpretation. Her short stories reveal that the most terrifying thing in life
is not one of the supernatural ghosts that populate her work, but human
prejudice. As far as I’m concerned, only writers of genius are able to convey a
layered and nuanced world, and Intan is one of them.'
Eka Kurniawan, internationally acclaimed author of Beauty is a Wound and Man Tiger
