![]() ![]() “When in competition,” the narrator tells us, “women need to eliminate rivals and be unsparing in their hatred.” In the end, of course, no one wins, and Sindelarat spends the remainder of her short life pregnant, trying to produce a male heir to the throne. In this version Sindelarat is no innocent, and gains her advantage over her sisters through a pact with dark forces and the exploitation of her superior beauty. The first story, “The Blind Woman Without a Toe”, establishes the terrain: it is a re-telling of the Cinderella story, transposed onto an Indonesian setting (Cinderella is now Sindelarat), and told from the perspective of one of the “evil stepsisters”, now a blind, vagrant old woman. Apple and Knife is a riot of disobedient women, including vengeful, neglected wives, prostitutes and saucy dancers, a village abortionist shunned as a witch, and a host of more supernatural, randy and ravenous devil-women.Īpple and Knife is the Indonesian author’s first short story collection to be translated into English, and its mode, in both form and content, is a kind of Frankensteinian, gruesome and unruly hybridity. ![]() ![]() In her author acknowledgments, Intan Paramaditha thanks “the first disobedient woman” – her mother – who “inspired many of early stories”. A collection of playful and provocative short stories by Intan Paramaditha ![]()
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