Beneath the burqas

[LostInTime]

The world's largest Muslim country is ground zero for a fledgling literary movement whose topic is sex and whose practitioners are women.


But during the school break for the holy month of Ramadan, Dinar Rahayu was free to indulge her fantasies. At a desktop computer, in the middle-class home where she lived with her parents, she wrote a novel whose two main characters think they are incarnations of the god Apollo and a Valkyrie, a Nordic deity. Theirs is a world where women dominate men with abusive sex.

It is an explicit story from the start, conjuring scenes of strippers, child rape and sadomasochism. In one of the opening chapter's tamer passages, the skillful strokes of a transsexual named Dinar persuade her lover Jonggi to put down his can of soda and the TV's remote control.