Here, though, the story of “Sin or ’Sindelarat’” (the Bahasa Indonesia equivalent of “Cinderella”) is recounted from the perspective of one of these nameless sisters, to craft an old story with new claws. The crone is one of the Ugly Sisters from the Grimms’ ”Cinderella,” who were allegedly punished for their jealousy by having their eyes gored out by a flock of snarky birds. This is a promise of gore to which we giddily squeal “Yes, yes, tell us all! Leave no stone, or indeed toe, unturned. Are you sure you want to hear how I became blind?” (p. In the tradition of many fairy-tale collections, the first story, “The Blind Woman Without a Toe,” begins with the enticements of an old crone storyteller, beckoning us to “Come. These stories reverberate with women's voices, voicelessness, and silence. beginning with gossip as a woman’s derided instrument of self-assertion, closes with muteness, as another stratagem of influence.” (Marina Warner, The Beast and the Blonde (1994), p. “Fairy tales give women a place from which to speak, but they sometimes speak of speechlessness as a weapon, a last resort.
So be warned: here be empowered monsters. With sexy monsters and the monstrously sexy, these stories map the ranges of female desire, rage and transformation. Rather than stories of redemption and restoration, of the goodly justice usually served up in folktales, these are stories of righteous vengeance wrought and lust slaked, of sacrifice given freely and forcefully taken. These are women with swagger, and as such this is a collection for Lilith, not for Eve. Catalogued here are powerful, disobedient women who misbehave, following their own desires over the dictates of society. Sacrifice, fairy tale and orgiastic butchery are the abundant tributaries which converge into the rivers of blood meandering through these stories. Here’s why: avenging Javanese Goddesses, revenant dangdut dancers and fleets of rats populate-or rather spill, scratch and crawl from-the pages of Apple and Knife, Indonesian writer Intan Paramaditha’s first collection of short stories to be translated into English (by Stephen J Epstein). Do these words excite you? Because they should.
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