I took some time from this column to go back to what I have always loved doing most since I was a child: reading.

Of late I have been working on several manuscripts, a collection of 400 poems, a book on educational theory, a book-length analysis of Malaysia’s road to the Islamic state, a collection of cultural-philosophical essays, and memoir of growing up in Johor Bahru in the hippie 60s, and my favourite, a novel.

So, I have been busy. And I have missed my column and my fellow brilliant commentators who have never given up educating us on the need for Malaysia to be a better society. I’d like to share a book I had just finished reading and analysing, ‘Beauty is a Wound’ (or ‘Cantik itu luka’), by Eka Kurniawan, a promising and engaging Indonesian author.

Here is my critical reading of that important Indonesian novel, post-Pramoedya Ananta Toer.

I propose chronicling a nation's pattern of mega-change is an aspect of the novel that is worth exploring as an instance wherein the author crafts the philosophical underpinning of the story of the birth and growth of Indonesia a country sold into prostitution by the forces that march history, and how the worldview of the nation is shaped primarily by the pathological condition metaphored by prostitution.

In the protagonist Dewi Ayu the portrait of the new nation as a prostitute and in Conrad Kliwon (chapter 7) the life force that tried to save the nation from being forever being a whore...