3 ideas
In a town where soldiers, gangsters and political men hold power, a woman's beauty can make her a target. Dewi Ayu, whose own beauty drew men to her through the colonial and occupation years, prays that her fourth child will be ugly as protection. The book treats the ugly daughter, ironically named Beauty, as a wish to escape this danger, though the three elder daughters' marriages come about in different ways, including love and arrangement.
The novel shows colonial and political violence persisting as a curse passed down a bloodline rather than ending when regimes change. A Dutch planter's seizure of a local woman produces a curse that follows his descendants through incest, forced marriage and death. The pattern is that unacknowledged founding crimes return in each generation's intimate life, with the soldier, the gangster and the communist each claiming one of the daughters.
The novel reports resurrections, ghosts and the 1965 anti-communist massacres in the same deadpan register, with rivers choked by communist corpses and the dead haunting the living. Telling suppressed state violence as folklore lets it be spoken about when official history denies it. It also shows the massacre as absurd rather than rational.