On Soledad’s Sister: Unsaid, Untold

I’ll start this (non)review by saying that I want to write about Gina Apostol’s Gun Dealers’ Daughter, but as I have not yet gathered my thoughts into coherence about it, I’ll delay (once again!) and talk about a more recent read, even if it’s likely considered a “classic” in the canon these days.

When I think of Soledad’s Sister by Butch Dalisay, I think of a school bag slung over my shoulder, a list of books to read for the semester, the hustle outside the glass doors — out into the sunshine, the busy street — so analogous is it with my university days. But there’s a kind of freedom in reading a book everyone tells you is canon, reading it because you can, and because you know every curriculum has its limits.

Ah, but precisely: this novel is premised on what the reader doesn’t know.

Para lang maiba: Jose “Butch” Dalisay’s Soledad’s Sister in sepia

A coffin arrives in Manila, you are told, and from the get-go it’s a disaster veiled in what looks to be orderly logistics. But what captivates in the novel is not the mystery that the dead body has been mislabeled Aurora V. Cabahug’s — who is, in fact, Soledad’s sister, alive and well — but the language in which the author deftly describes the crudeness of life, which outlines not vulgarity, but rather simplicity. It is not that life is reduced to physical needs, but rather that life is defined by the concrete and the puddles and the karaoke bar as much as the inner turmoil of never understanding a family member.

When the crate arrived, Al had just finished his supper of fish in black bean sauce, two cups of rice, a glass of watery coffee, and a banana, taken in the outdoor stall just beyond the airport fence. One of the new helpers, a girl from Ozamis, has blushed when he mentioned something about a Sunday walk at the Luneta, and how relaxing and cheap it was to spend the night on the grass, like many couples did. I’ll give her a week, he thought, picking the fish out of his teeth—or was it the gummy young banana—as he strode through the gate toward the cargo warehouse (Dalisay 6-7).

In reading novels, we are told that suspension of disbelief is a must. What they don’t tell you, but which you suspect anyway, is that suspension is always more difficult when the setting is your own. When a novel shuttles between Manila, Hong Kong, and Jeddah, but pivots in its attempt to solve mystery in the small town of Paez, talking about the construction of a village named after a mayor’s wife and then a play between Bagumbayan and “bayani,” the multiplication of its phases, its cheap architecture, and even when the narrative winds its way to nineties EDSA, nothing of it is romanticized.

Interestingly, the novel is easily mistaken for the hundred-odd takes into the lives of the OFW: the plight, the struggles, the families left behind, the bodies shipped back in boxes, neither luggage nor package. And while its mystery looks to be how Soledad, taking the name of her sister Aurora, met her demise, the tragedy is in the unnamed space the latter occupies, that ever-fragile, long-winded pause between thinking up a goal and achieving it, stuck as one is in a pale imitation of success (in the case of Aurora, or Rory, a cabaret-cum-bar complete with a DJ, karaoke, and GROs.

It was a little past six <…> indeed he Flame Tree was home to a good many of these gentlemen, for whom dinner was achieved by ordering several platefuls of diced pig’s cheeks or tuna sashimi, washed down with a few cases of San Miguel. Rory got a kick out of pretending before newcomers that she was just one of the girls, and a particularly hardworking one at that. Her name was on the bill outside the bar, but it was a tiny sign that had become more than shopworn over the past three months. Few people made the connection between the routinary “Tonite’s Queen of Song Ms. Rory Cabahug” of the white plastic letters (with the broken right leg in the second ‘A’), punched into velvet backing like a funeral announcement, and the slim, pale woman who left her guests feeling that she had known them all their lives but that they would never know her with the same unnerving confidence (Dalisay 37-38).

These little tragedies are what make the story tangible, hold the disbelief at bay. The entire novel is told not only in different places, from different points of view, but from different points in time, all without taking leave of the present timeline, where Rory Cabahug and her less-than-a-white-knight policeman Walter G. Zamora fetch a body, lose it, and discover, with the reader, that what is at stake is more than the act of reclaiming a body, a name, but blood ties, relocation, identity.

In the end, the novel (re)turns to what it has only apparently promised you from its first word: Soledad in the name of Aurora, well and alive, just before death. But more a glimpse into a narrative than an actual narrative itself, she disappears, elusive. After all the details, after the suspension of disbelief, the unraveling of character pasts and segues into car theft and various petty crimes in the metro, the novel shows, incidentally, not just a mystery, but becomes a mystery in itself.

Now if only I, as reader, could reconcile myself to and appreciate this path.

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Gun Dealers’ Daughter next, I promise. That’s a whole other Soledad.

The Difficulty in Dancing

In order to hold procrastination at bay, one must, well, do. I thought about starting this review long hand, while I have no time to really focus on a laptop or computer screen when there are handouts to think about, but no: what I want to say is easily available in my mind, about Haruki Murakami’s Dance Dance Dance. I don’t know if it’s taboo to read this right after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – only that I would not recommend these two one after the other.

One and the other

Of course, blatant comparisons are also supposed to be a no-no when writing reviews; let the work stand for itself, is the likely rule. But I refuse, if only because Dance Dance Dance, I feel, strips away what is usually the given (and therefore practically expected) premises of Murakami’s novels, such that they also serve to suspend disbelief. The ability of his protagonists, to put on hold the search for economic stability, in favor of searching for what will fill their frenetic unease, has always attracted me because I believe that it is what many of us would opt for, if we did not believe that even our physical (read: financial struggles) are also somehow integral to our concept of self.

In Dance Dance Dance, all these things (the search for an existential answer, the momentary leave from the day job, the inner turmoil, the unexplainable need to follow one’s guts although nothing else in the plot prior seems to dictate its necessity), are present, but the chronicle of actually telling it is garbled. Many times I wondered if the novel was really meant to start this way, in medias res, and if so, then why?

I rolled over in bed, stared at the ceiling, and let out a deep sigh. Oh, give in, I thought. But the idea of giving in didn’t take hold. It’s out of your hands, kid. Whatever you may be thinking, you can’t resist. The story’s already decided (Murakami 6)

Here, too, Murakami’s protagonist searches for someone he believes is crying out for him. We are told — as we can assume strikes a similar note in his other novels — that something is incomplete in the protagonist’s life, that there is something he missed when he previously underwent a self-imposed hermitage. These, undoubtedly, are the things that make Murakami’s characters endearing, particularly to me; this is why it was a surprise, even to me, that  the protagonist in Dance Dance Dance disappoints.

Yes, I remind myself even now. All of Murakami’s characters dance to a tune that is understood only by the reader seeking refuge from a mega-capitalist world and the characters themselves. But Dance Dance Dance‘s protagonist reads more like a pale reckoning of the other two protagonists I’ve encountered in Murakami — of indeed, all his other complex characters. When I think of this particular nameless protagonist, I realize that I agree with many of his principles on capitalism, and the apparent self-defeating value of “popular” industry.

And with not one speck of ambition, not one iota of expectation. My only concern was to do things systematically, from one end to the other. I sometimes wonder if this might not prove to be the bane of my life. After wasting so much pulp and ink myself, who was I to complain about waste? We live in an advanced capitalist society, after all. Waste is the name of the game, its greatest virtue. Politicians call it ‘refinements in domestic consumption.’ I call it meaningless waste. A difference of opinion. Which doesn’t change the way we live (Murakami 12).

The real problem though, is that as the novel progresses the protagonist becomes the horrific, transparent character one might pride herself or himself on hearing about but only encountering (with luck) once in a blue moon. There’s not much excitement in the plot, because no matter what moral dilemma presents itself, Murakami’s character is able to untangle the knots in the situation. The journey to clarity is not as fraught with pathos as would be needed to captivate the reader’s attention. Whether it’s rearing a child, treating women with grace, or confronting instances that only vaguely resemble the paranormal, the protagonist becomes a straightforward book of morals, minus, at least, the condescension.

Ah, but there is the matter of a redeeming quality (sold separately most of the time, as it is not a requirement).

There is still something that at least attempts to be a ballast to the protagonist’s transparency, and probably because of Murakami’s material, it should come as no surprise that it lies in fear of losing one’s anchor. So while the protagonist’s consciousness holds no surprise (perhaps like the mega-capitalist world the novel accepts and bewails), there is still a breath of fresh air at the end of the novel, but it is so faint, it comes only as a sense of relief, instead of catharsis.

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The rest (to be read, or if already read, to digest, digest, digest):

A question of time (from L – R): Skyworld Volume 1 by Mervin Ignacio and Ian Sta. Maria, The Collapse of What Separates Us by Vincenz Serrano, Love and Other Lemons by Katrina Stuart Santiago, Gun Dealers’ Daughter by Gina Apostol, and The Pale King by David Foster Wallace. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy not included because it was too big

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To end, imagine yourself in the Dolphin Hotel, disoriented by your return to the real world:

Now that September has come

Last Thursday, I reached for my copy of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things from my bedroom shelf and re-read what I still find to be the most-gut-wrenching part of the book.

There is very little that anyone could say to clarify what happened next. Nothing that (in Mammachi’s book) would separate Sex from Love. Or Needs from Feelings…

Only that there were tears. Only that Quietness and Emptiness fitted together like stacked spoons. Only that there was a snuffling in the hollows at he base of a lovely throat. Only that a hard honey-colored shoulder had a semicircle of teethmarks on it. Only that they held each other close, long after it was over. Only that what they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief.

Only that once again they broke the Love Laws. That lay down who should be loved. And how. And how much (Roy 310-311).

Last Thursday night, I cried.

I’m not entirely sure I can explain what prompted me to remember this book. I’m not entirely sure why I needed to cry. The passage, in the context of the book, is full of anguish, to be certain. But I wasn’t crying because of the book as much as I was crying because I needed something to cry about.

I needed a great flooding emotion, beyond anything tangible in real life that, in moments of frustration, would be enough to bring me to tears. But those kinds of tears were not what I needed that night. I needed a grand, sweeping emotion to prompt me to imagine future events, absurd though they may be. I needed an anguish that is not mine to bring me out of my own page, to strip me of petty concerns so that I could feel I was crying for something greater than myself.

I needed to Feel.

And in those brief moments when I let myself cry, stop, and cry again before I told myself Go to bed you have work in the morning if you don’t stop your eyes will be fluffy,  I remembered who I was again and what I want to be, and why it matters, although I still don’t know how to do it.

where the 2010 books go

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The Reality of Muriel Spark’s “Reality and Dreams”

Sometimes, in the midst of panicking because I’ve just finished the new book I bought, I look at my bookshelf and realize that there still some things I haven’t finished reading. Sometimes, these are books which I’ve tried to finish in the past and which I’ve given up on, and sometimes I genuinely meant to finish them, but simply forgot.

My copy of Spark’s “Reality and Dreams”

Reality and Dreams by Muriel Spark belongs to the latter. Ever since I found out that the film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” was based on a novel by this author, I became really keen on reading anything by her. Reality and Dreams may not have been my first choice, but book lust told me to buy it a year ago, and so I did.

Sadly, I found it underwhelming.

The story revolves around fictional film director Tom Richards, who spends the first quarter or so of the novel recovering from a bad fall from the crane. Always walking the space between reality and dreams but never firmly staying in one, Tom is reminiscent of Fellini’s Guido Anselmi (and perhaps the movie “Nine”‘s Guido Contini, but I wouldn’t know because I’ve no intentions of watching the film–yet). He is still married to his wife, Claire, but both tolerate each other’s affairs. Tom, being a film director, naturally meets many glamorous actresses; as an artist, he often allows himself to be carried away with an idea. And since for Tom, there is simply no difference between his artistic inspiration, his film, and his real life, a great cause for his suffering is that no one seems to accept the why of his obsession, as much as his family and friends simply take it as something that just is.

In terms of plot, the novel is really quite simple, and its main shocker (the disappearance of one of the characters) doesn’t really last long enough to sustain the curiosity it sparks. Then again, from the very beginning the novel does not promise to be a wild roller coaster ride of good-versus-evil. The most confusing (complicated?) that the plot has to offer is the who-hooks-up-with-whom question, which is only such because almost everyone in the story hooks up with each other.

Still, what really bothers me about it is that the supposed villain of the story seems to have no real motivation. Yes, there is an implied reason for the antagonist’s scheme, but because the events of the story come about seamlessly (i.e., as in a dream), the reader isn’t really given the chance to feel for the villain, and as such his/her actions seem only natural–and hence nothing to be upset over (or be excited about, in any case).

Then again, that is the charm of Reality and Dreams. It makes the simple [denied] confusion between what is real and what is desired into something tangible, because it occurs in the daily life of one man and his family. It’s not one of my favorites, but it may still be due for a re-read in the future.

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And now for a scene I love, from “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”:

Prop up your books in case of intruders!

Something Old, Something New

The age at which I distinctly remember becoming an avid reader was around thirteen years ago, when I was ten years old. Back then, receiving a Borrower of the Month certificate from the library seemed like an accomplishment, not a witty, institutionally-accepted way of saying “Oo na, ikaw na ang nanghiram ng gustong hiramin ng iba! Ikaw na talaga!”

But like I’ve said before, I’m not a very good reader when it comes to a collection of short stories. I can gobble up novels like there’s no tomorrow. I can be patient enough with poetry to enjoy annotating. But I become impatient both with myself and what I’m reading when faced with an anthology of short fiction: not that I haven’t enjoyed Leopoldo Y. Yabes’ Philippine Short Stories Part I (1941-1949). Or that, truthfully, I am entirely finished reading it (I’ve only got a few more stories to go! I plead the distraction of other books, I am sorry).

A strange confession: I don’t think myself special or particularly brilliant for learning to love reading, and for consistently doing so for a huge chunk of my life. I guess this is because I am surrounded by people who, without (or at least just a lick and no more) of self-righteousness, view reading as a form of productivity–not to be mistaken with any economic achievement, but with a kind of hunger-cum-panic-mode that comes with the thought of not reading anything in the interim. But the real bite of the confession is that I didn’t realize until recently, how much I was bound to discover when I read things beyond my comfort zone.

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Ah, you think, but this is an old piece of advise, yes? Read broad and wide, in and out of your comfort zone! I suppose it’s only by inference that I know now, that what I’m bound to learn isn’t about the material, but about myself as a reader.

I can’t possibly discuss every story in Mr. Yabes’ anthology. I can only enumerate here, the things I learned about myself when reading, one after the other, stories so old that, let’s face it, they are either classics or just plain old–perhaps more reminiscent for what they tell us of how our craft has evolved than anything else.

I learned that I am a city girl through and through. And that this works against me, makes me an impatient reader when I read Antonio S. Gabila’s “Going Away, Far,” or “Two in a Clearing” by Romeo C. Velasco (which until now I am struggling to finish). I learned that even in terms of interests, mine lie the urban way, leaning towards Vicente Rivera, Jr.’s “All Over the World” and “Another Country” by Edilberto K. Tiempo.

I learned that I appreciate stories that revolve around a singular moment, stories that stretch the narrative to encircle the instance only to neatly come back to it, more explicitly, in the end: for instance, Ligaya Victorio Reyes’ “A Peace Like Death,” “Christmas Visit,” “I Am Thinking of Us Today,” and “Return to Capas.”

I remembered the ability of a favorite author to change voice, easily shifting from one milieu to another: Nick Joaquin’s “It Was Later Than We Thought,” “May Day Eve,” and “A Pilgrim Yankee’s Progress,” and recall, with guilt, what I can’t say I’ve failed at in my own writing, because I haven’t tried enough.

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A year ago, I sat in a workshop where we ended up discussing the idea of “preciousness” in early Filipino literature in English writing. I sat there listening, curious and alarmed, the former  out of personal interest, the latter because the discussion was a spin off of a critique for my story. I probably cannot recreate here what was said in that discussion. I probably cannot talk of my own writing without coming off as defensive or pretentious. I can only say, I think, regarding what I learned reading Mr. Yabes’ anthology, and recalling that wonderful discussion, that I see stories from this anthology as offering the same comfort as, well, fairy tales.

I suppose distance and time does that to a reader: makes almost fantastic the experience of impending war, or its immediate aftermath on civilians; makes fancy old notions of courtship. But I have learned that most of all, I find comfort in old stories, long after I’ve zigzagged my way around postmodern, sci-fi, medieval epic fantasy, and (prose) poetry, both local and foreign.

It’s strange, because I categorize my (local) literature like this. The ones I buy (and help sell, sometimes, haha!) these days, and the ones I talk about with friends, I separate from the ones I read as a schoolgirl, in plaid again, to be discussed with chalkboard and seatmate and professor. I draw the line not out of any inherent quality that I find better in one set of works and not in the other, but to delineate one self from the other, to realize what brought me comfort then (Carlos Bulosan’s “My Father Goes to Court,” Gregorio C. Brillantes’ “Faith, Love, Time, and Dr. Lazaro”) and what I enjoy picking apart today (Tara FT Sering’s “Preview,” Vincenz Serrano’s “If You Can’t See My Mirrors I Can’t See You”).

It’s the same, I think, when you’re still too young to notice that a grandfather or grandmother will tell you the same story again and again long after you’ve tired of it. And again the same when, years later, you delight in the memory of them again. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis writes to his goddaughter,

My dear Lucy,

I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realised that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it.

I’m not sure that I’ll ever re-read the entire Part I of Mr. Yabes’ anthology cover-to-cover. Most likely I’ll pick out a story or two every now and then, when there’s nothing else to read: look back then, feel some comfort now, wonder about books yet un-bought, think of ways I’d misunderstood, like bildungsroman, like things I’ve yet to read but tell myself I can understand.

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This is where I admit that this is one heck of a post I delayed making.

Second Person, A Second Time: Getting Better and Amazing Grace

What was it about Tara FT Sering’s “Getting Better” (also featured in Reconnaissance) that pulled me in? Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, in the book’s end note, discusses its character’s modernity, infused with a kind of hip urgency, which I believe to be true. For me, personally, the allure of chick literature is that it invokes pop culture with no apologies. There’s not doubt you’ll find the title Sex & The City more than once, not just in “Getting Better,” but in countless chick lit books and short fiction; there will also be references to 90′s romantic movies, or the titles of John Hughes films that were a collective yearning growl making up one generation.

Still at the personal level but mixed with a heightened interest for the possibilities of narrative-writing, the instant attraction I felt towards “Getting Better” had to do with its use of the second person narration. Of course, that might not be as novel as it sounds; if you look hard enough you’ll find other books and short stories in other genres that use the same technique.

But Tara Sering’s Kar in “Getting Better,” narrated through the second person establishes an intimate fixture in the reader’s mind because almost all of it reads as a steady “Keep Calm” guide. It’s practically list of reminders on what to do on emergencies (i.e., when the Mr. Right in the text becomes shady–which happens quite often), only in the form of a short, fluid novel.

It’s difficult (and not really worthwhile) to have to convince people that between the lines of every chick lit fiction lies a sliver of profundity. It’s strange, because as I’ve found in “Getting Better,” it’s not so much the huge life lessons you find in this kind of text, but the little tidbits that your mother has shared with you as a toddler, but have forgotten in the rush of adult life.

At some point, like, say, three in the morning, stop kicking yourself. You never imagined that at twenty-seven, you’d be trying to remember something your mama said to ease a late twenties kind of pain. Did she say you’re too nice? Or was it “be nice to yourself?” At eight in the morning, you wake up from a weird dream. In it, you were making out with Miko on the couch of your apartment and your mom suddenly breezed by holding a large black tire salbabida. Under her breath she said,  ”‘Yan ba ang being nice to yourself? (Sering, Getting Better 68)

Structurally speaking, I prefer “Getting Better” to Amazing Grace, which is also told from a second person point-of-view, although lacking in weight. If in the former, the reader gets a whiff of Something Fishy, the rest of the narrative finally reveals that the problem per se isn’t what Kar first believes but is actually something else. In Amazing Grace, meanwhile, right off the bat readers are told what went down and why Grace is Holly Golightly in tears on the first page.

My copies of Tara FT Sering’s Reconnaissance (UP Jubilee Student Edition) and Amazing Grace (Anvil Publishing, Inc)

The problem, I think, is that Amazing Grace unknowingly paralleled the show it’s a pun of. The revelation that leads to character development could have happened earlier, but not without the fuel the rest of the novel needs to go on, so what happens is a long drawn out narrative that almost (just almost!, never fear) crosses into wild goose chase territory.

But the charm is still there–if not in Grace and her (in)consistency, then in her two travel companions, Lena and Han. Not all of us might be able to relate to Grace’s problem of tracking a cheating fiance across Singapore and Bangkok, but Grace’s (in)consistency, contrasted with Han as urban girl without rest while nursing a broken heart and Lena as married woman desiring space and quality bonding time with the girls, succeeds in nudging readers towards the direction of Total Life Enjoyment.

As in “Getting Better,” though, the moment of enlightenment in Amazing Grace stretches into relaxed breathing after the chaos of Something Fishy, Revealed. While I believe the latter’s epilogue was unnecessary (I think inference is always a fun activity for the reader), Grace arrives at much the same place Kar does, because she’s able to look past the chaos, and find peace in her own self.

Feel a light breeze blow through the alfresco cafe. Trace the wrinkled bark of the tree next to you, from the trunk all the way up along its branches. There is something nice and wonderful, you think, in the way its top looms large with a burst of green leaves against the sun (Sering, Amazing Grace 180).

Form(s) of Ecstasy

Coming out of an illness these days is like coming out of an uneasy sleep; the kind where you were sure you dozed off in the midst of noise, which you were only ever able to effectively block out with some meds and the insistence of your body on enough, enough.

The actual awakening, per se, is not so much a barrage of things you don’t want to hear, not because they are irrelevant but because they are less than comprehensive: cue the Facebook posts about the latest corporate massacre of trees in the summer capital; cue the SM-as-evil graphics;

cue the endless outpouring of criticism/metacriticism/anti-criticism parading as metacriticism in the form of status updates, x number of shares, and convenient, takeaway comments, for an article about the status quo that you’ve heard of and experienced.

It’s a slower process than it sounds.

In the interim, while hacking your throat out and trying not to forget the antibiotics to combat your infection, you ask yourself why you were so concerned in the first place; why you bother about how your country makes you feel, at all, when most of the day–which you spend, anyway, these days, toiling in front of an old laptop for the usual peso-per-word rate–you don’t experience the grand heat of such hatred anyway (But of course there’s the knowledge that the bigger picture is only ever thus because of its instances: in the way your elders tell you there are outfits that shouldn’t be worn in the event of using public transportation; in the way narrow back alleys and groups of men should be avoided; in the danger of cat calls and good morning greetings that are anything but because their eyes say more than their mouths do. So you attempt to articulate, because you feel it is the little you can do).

Then, thankfully, P posts something that makes sense. Maybe it isn’t the best kind of criticism, lacks that lauded university flair (no heavy school-of-thought name dropping, here!), but good god, it’s still more fair (the informed kind, mind) than the news you see on TV or the angry Facebook outbursts

(There’s also this: calls to boycott SM? I’m sorry, did we suddenly and with ease just magick ourselves from the specific confines of our third world country? Have we re-eimagined into sheer nonexistent delusion the convenience that the said establishment brings, og perhaps not immediately to the middle class to which I belong, but rather to the masses? But then again there’s the more sound suggestion: not to boycott it, but merely to avoid it; patronize the competition whenever possible and go to SM only as a last resort.

Please. I’ll be the first to tell you that even having read Indolent Indio, followed the story on TV and radio, and attempted to compartmentalize this issue aside from whatever personal biases I may have gathered against the great Henry Sy empire, I would still rather those trees stayed put, period. I would rather we invested in more sustainable means of construction and forestry. I would rather we didn’t need an SM in every effing city.

But my next move would be to tell you that frankly, it’s a mall culture, baby. Bobby Chinn has noted it, but if you missed that you need only to walk around a mall or two to note the many passersby without a clear destination in mind, the clumps of people sitting around busying themselves with their cellular phones without any particular urgency.

And this stasis goes on, mind you. I witnessed it myself, having had to wait for an appointment and having nowhere else to go. It’s not a matter of passing the few spare minutes but of literally wasting away in a mall, waiting for something I obviously couldn’t name for them.

Boycott? Avoid? I can try, but when push comes to shove and I need a place where I can pay my bills or today’s price of gas (the bulk of which, no matter how much I may try to shoulder, still largely falls on my elderly parents) says it is more convenient to go to where they insist We’ve Got It All for You rather than somewhere else, I can’t say I’ll put up much resistance).

But hey, it’s all in a day’s work, isn’t it? Because to live is to come to terms with life and its forms of irony.

And all the better when it’s the third world, Philippine kind of irony.

In the slow awakening of still recovering, you will learn that James Templeton needs the Internet to give him a conscience, because he’s been “stealing from a 23-year-old freelance designer from a third world country.” And your guts scream that this is wrong. It is wrong.

How do you know? Because you have principle. Then you back up slowly and think of how much of what you know as principle was shaped by your alma mater, and how that education has limits (Ironically, and therefore in keeping with an observation, for an article that discusses a Western take on the matter, there’s this, found first by M and thereafter shared with G).

But you also know that “to go beyond” means “to construct the specific limits which your Jesuit, Filipino, and yet still tongue-in-cheek ahistorical education gives you.”

Oh, you wish the answers wouldn’t come so easily, but they do. You know it, because you do gush about Harry (and to a great extent Katniss and Jonathan Strange and Chrestomanci, all):

but you can gush local, too!:

And it sounds like such a privileged state, doesn’t it. But because it is privileged, it is questionable, as such:

Where then, if you stand so proudly thus, are the rest of “you”? Why do you have to go to such lengths to describe what this is? Why do so few of your peers understand the politics of publishing (You are flattered by their insistence that you should come up with your own book, admit it; but you are even more immensely fearful of the fact that even the thought of it already tastes of backlash and the already um no thanks, I’d rather not), when their very own book-buying preferences and the structure of your friendly neighborhood bookstore dictates it?

The answer is in believed normalcy, in the status quo. In an uneasy peace, built on the premise that we should agree to see what is wrong as simply what is–cue the sight of endless shanties covered up by MMDA insistence on Metro Gwapo, cue the reality of children selling sampaguita held up on strings perceived as nostalgic cultural icon instead of something that ought to move us into no pun intended action–this is where we are and where many voices will insist we stay.

And you ask me why I am stressed? Or why I seem a little “nega”?

My dear, writing and talking about these things don’t constitute being a cesspool of negative energy. It means simply to be alive and accept the fact that I am an intellectual. I am this intellectual, born and bred not by mere institutions but by my milieu, by friends and teachers who became friends, by book-buying habits, by mistakes I made as an employee and now as whatever it is you would deem to call me.

(Puwede rin namang sabihin na ‘di tulad ng iba, tila hindi naman malupit ang naranasan  ko. When it comes down to it, I don’t have the industry coming at me with claws and fangs but a small but steady stream of comments made in passing. Ang pagsusulat ko dito ay hindi rin naman upang subukin na makihalo sa isang hot na isyu o para lamang mapag-usapan tulad ng kilala kong nasabihan na, tulad ng natukoy ko na, ng mga mas marahas pang mga salita. This isn’t a case of misrecognition or projection, either, as I cannot help if I feel some empathetic solidarity with those who have experienced so much worse, without mistaking myself for them.

Besides, I have asked myself if the very fact that what I experienced would amount to a collection of passing remarks only, would make these instances acceptable. And after some thought, the answer I received was “No.” And it continues to be “No” as I type this).

And isn’t it ironic, now? So you thought I was going to stop at getting good grades. I am reminded of my brother, when, in my teenage years he kept lashing out against people who call themselves “critics.” Anong klaseng trabaho yun, he would say, sisiraan mo lang ang gawa ng iba. So we know that not only is there a deep misunderstanding of what criticism actually is; the other ugly head of the problem is that critics are boxed separately from intellectuals, and too, critics are seen as nothing but–oh no wait, I repeat myself.

Destructive? Noisy? Negative? Did you think we were coming to inspire ideological peace? Non-violence as a way of life, always. But harmony in criticism? Ah, my dear, you make me laugh.

–

I suppose I wrote this because I was seriously considering shutting this blog down.  Which wouldn’t be a catastrophe, mind you. I have no delusions about academic credibility, and better writer-critics have said similar in sleeker styles than mine.

But then stopping this would have meant to stop reading the people I read online; would have meant to stop talking to certain friends at all because largely what holds us together are the things we know better than to be silent about. And I would fool myself into thinking I am okay with this. But if I think the field needs anything but ideological/critical peace, what right have I to fake a conscience that is at peace with silence?

And well then, thank god for meds*. I think.

_

*Edit to add: or perhaps for the after-the-stasis feeling they inevitably lead to later on.

Death, or Endless Charm*

*Nothing that will count as spoilers for The High Cost of Living. Unless you’re a purist.

There is, obviously, something about Neil Gaiman and Mike Dringenberg’s version of Death. An anthropomorphic personification of her name–just like the rest of the Endless, their version of death is decidedly in-your-face goth, so it is easy why any teenage girl (even boy, but as I am not one, I cannot posit how valid that is) would be drawn to her–or at least, I know that at age fifteen, I was. Besides, she’s full of catchy sayings that you can go around quoting to friends without them being overly worried about your mental health–well, not immediately anyhow.

But these are all easy reasons to point out. Here’s another one: Death as a woman  presents a more caring view of one’s demise (vis-a-vis the image of Mother Nature, or even of Mother Earth, and versus the image of a too-often conceived male hooded figure with scythe in tow, just for effect). It’s a complete subversion, although Death of the Endless does indulge to show people what they think she should look like, skulls and blood and fascinating morbidity and all, when provoked. For proof, just take the time to read the manga re-telling of Season of Mists by Jill Thompson, entitled Death: At Death’s Door.

Maybe it’s something about the early twenties, I think, this new appreciation for Death. Free from any faux-fascination with goth culture (my friends will know what I am talking about), new to the actual lived concept of “yuppie,” and having shunned certain opportunities for others while wondering why the fuck the cab drivers are so picky with destinations these days, I’ve found that the character of Death created by Gaiman and Dringenberg is enticing because she’s simple–and by simple, I mean refreshing.

Case in point, I finally downloaded a copy of Death: The High Cost of Living two nights ago, and was pleasantly surprised at all the (re)new(ed) reasons to love the character. The premise for this specific spin-off? Let me quote:

“Every day in every century Death takes on mortal flesh, better to comprehend what the lives she takes must feel like, to taste the bitter tang of mortality: and this is the price she must pay for being the divider of the living from all that has gone before, all that must come after.” Death: The High Cost of Living, Chapter 3, page 3

So that in itself is a hell of a premise. More significantly, if you’re familiar with The Sandman, you’ll know that the reason Death is such a welcome little ray of sunlight is because in many ways she’s Dream’s foil character. Dark, compelling, and magical though Dream is, it is only when Death pops up that readers realize how deep inside Dream’s self-centered and indulgent psyche they’ve been drawn. So Death marches along and reminds us to be silly, even if she has to conjure the spirit of Mary Poppins, as she does in The Sound of Her Wings.

But in High Cost of Living, I fell in love with the idea of Death again when I realized how charmingly she simplifies life–and it pays us all to remember that to simplify something doesn’t necessarily mean to reduce it.

Because, I think, in your twenties, you have this immense capacity to go past Sexton’s teenage angst; and yet you have that voice in your head that insists on making you believe that indeed you are jaded, and you can go head-to-head with any senile old (wo)man who would wrestle that title from you.

Still, regardless: you haven’t yet shaken off the optimism that is one part childhood naivete and just your so-far supply of realist views. And if you’re lucky enough, this is enough to convince you that kindness goes a long way–not that it eliminates the bumps on the road, but that it makes the being jostled and juggled around more fun, filling spaces with laughter and the tired smile at your fellow-passenger, because you both know how tired you both are.

And that’s who “Didi” is in The High Cost of Living. She’s the girl who can strike up a conversation and, without any ulterior motives, score a free hotdog, cab ride, and entry to The Undercut. She’s the one who will insist on accountability (the faintest trace of the immortal Death in her though Didi herself has but the smallest trace of understanding), but graciously accepts what others have to offer her with a ready smile and thanks.

At the close, she’s Death of the Endless, but she is so very much all the good things we hope for–and grant me this, do experience–that in truth she behaves more like life.

–

In retrospect, I think of all the other things this entry could be, and I think that it could be the one that tells of how both gratifying and infuriating it can be to see a mighty character you admire suddenly become confused and uncertain of what she should do. In another sense this could review how a simple plot is a subtle and no-nonsense almost-criticism of how, in contrast, deliciously complicated the rest of The Sandman graphic novels can be–at the same time that it can be posited how the unanswered questions about its characters such as Mad Hettie and the Eremite leave much to be desired–in a bad way.

But this is also: to note how this is an entry that stands to stall in the meanwhile, as I think of what it is about Ligaya Victorio Reyes’ short stories in Leopoldo Y. Yabes’ Philippine Short Stories, 1941-1949, that makes my heart expand and shrivel in a vast spectrum of emotions.

And, of course, to posit that had this entry been written much early on in my life, it would be blind to the faults of the narrative because it would mainly be squealing over Gaiman’s spectacular storytelling. Which leads me to think again, how much more reading I need to do of local fantasy–noting, too, how my love for Nikki Alfar’s “The Stranded Star,” Michael A.R. Co’s “The God Equation,” and F.H. Batacan’s “The Gyutou” continue to persist.

In the King’s Wild Company: Re-Reading Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell*

(*Spoiler-free quotes)

For many years now, I’ve stopped being a re-reader. Whenever I find a book that I feel enchanted with, I gobble it up, swoon about it, and then realize that I still have unread ones sitting around, so I plunge into new pages in the blink of an eye. It’s a cycle, really, and I think it’s fueled by this fear that the world will end before I gobble up as many books as I can.

But a few weeks ago, I did what I’d considered unthinkable: picked up my copy of Susanna Clarke‘s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and started re-reading it–all 1006 pages of it.

My now well-read (aka, almost battered) copy of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell

A novel consisting of three volumes, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell spins a tale of how practical magic is revived in Napoleonic England. Spearheaded by the antisocial and ever-selfish Mr. Gilbert Norrell, the story traces how the perception of magic is gradually changed first as something only limited to theory, then gradually into something so practical it helps defeat the French, and finally to a cesspool of madness that the government–and indeed, domestic affairs–can do without. In the process, the ever-fickle and mysterious characters from Faerie wreak unseen havoc, and Norrell’s sole pupil, Jonathan Strange, forever longing to know more about John Uskglass, the Raven King and magician-ruler of Northern England, courts power beyond his darkest imaginings.

“He hardly ever spoke of magic, and when he did it was like a history lesson and no one could bear to listen to him.”

Now a lot can happen in a thousand pages, and if you want a fast-paced book, I wouldn’t recommend JSMN, especially since of all things, this novel has footnotes.  Clarke herself has admitted that these weren’t originally supposed to be part of the novel and they were placed there initially to help her keep track of things. In fact, she never spared the reader any kind of thought when she was writing the novel (which, I think, is a wonderful and unconscious kind of gift writers ought to give themselves every now and then, you know?). The result of this, admittedly, is that any reader will always be torn between continuing to read the main text or following the stories in the footnotes.

This time around, since I was re-reading, the answer was pretty simple: if I was in a part of the novel I wasn’t particularly interested in, the footnotes won; if the footnotes were rather dull, the main text won.

Doing this taught me a couple of things (about myself as a re-reader as much as about the book itself). First of all, I have this tendency not to savor words as much as I tend to do the first time I read them. I find this to be ironic, as JSMN is a great read, if not for its bulk, then for its dry, witty humor. Everywhere in the book, the description of characters, the weather, and the self-deprecating attitude towards the distinct Englishness of English magic made me laugh and, when I realized how I was prone to jump from one word to the next, read the same sentence over and again in the (futile) attempt of learning how Susanna Clarke managed such subtle distinction in her wordplay.

Yet at the same time it pleased his vanity to think how much better suited he was to his adventure than Norrell. “…Who was it that said a magician needs the subtlety of a Jesuit, the daring of a soldier and the wits of a thief? I believe it was meant for an insult, but it has some truth in it.” – Clarke, p. 793

After all, what I was really looking forward to–and was rewarded with, gladly–was the playfulness of Clarke’s language; how she can describe something without actually going through any detail. I continue to be drawn to this trait because frankly, it put to question what I know of adjectives and (on a related although more removed side note), synesthesia.

The box was small and oblong and apparently made of silver and porcelain. It was a beautiful shade of blue, but then again not exactly blue, it was more like lilac. But then again, not exactly lilac either, since it had a tinge of grey in it. To be more precise, it was the colour of heartache. But fortunately neither Miss Greysteel nor Aunt Greysteel had ever been much troubled by heartache and so they did not recognize it. – Clarke, pp. 786-787

Ironically, what makes JSMN so distinct in terms of language also makes it, well…tedious. The first volume, which focuses on Mr. Norrell, is so extremely slow-going and is so styled as Norrell’s own character, that my main fear whenever I think of new readers picking the novel up is that they’ll get so bored at the beginning and they’ll give up before Volume II: Jonathan Strange, where the plot really thickens.

“Can a magician kill by magic?” “I suppose a magician might, but a gentleman never could.”

Still, I tend to recommend this novel because, as Clarke admitted in taking her cue from Ursula K. Le Guin, the magicians here and the very practice of magic itself, all seem so real. You’ll almost believe that the repercussions of its practice are as palpable as those of medicine and agriculture. I like this novel because it allows itself to be indulgent. It doesn’t boast of turning faerie tales into sinister stories (although it succeeds in the turning). It doesn’t use accepted objective correlatives usually found in horror stories, but it manages to scare just the same. Unlike Harry Potter, it doesn’t have wands erupting with sparks or dishes that clean up after themselves or moving photographs.

Instead it relies on those feelings you get when you’re alone and start to suspect that something is happening around you, just around the corner of your vision…

It was as if a door had opened somewhere. Or possibly a series of doors. There was a sensation as of a breeze blowing into the house and bringing with it the half-remembered scents of childhood. There was a shift in the light which seemed to cause all the shadows in the room to fall differently. There was nothing more definite than that, and yet as often happens when some magic is occurring, both Drawlight and the lady had the strongest impression that nothing in the visible world could be relied upon any more. – Clarke, p. 496

And of course, JSMN has that tasteful touch of understated romance, humor, irony, and longing that is always associated with 19th century England, in the character of Jonathan Strange.

But that’s not what makes this book such a great (re-)read. It’s the fact that the titular characters are not the protagonists at all. It’s the (re)discovery that something darker and more ambiguous arranges every chess piece; it’s that mystery hinting at another opening just as you turn the last page, that really makes the characters wild and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell a fantastic novel.

–

And now: onto the next re-read (still on the Clarke spell, surely)–

The Ladies of Grace Adieu and Other Stories, by the same.

“Magic, madam, is like wine and, if you are not used to it, it will make you drunk.”

On His Two Novels and a Story: Why I love Nick Joaquin

I was seventeen and clad in plaid when I borrowed Nick Joaquin’s The Woman Who Had Two Navels from our high school library. My first experience of reading Joaquin came when, as a freshman in the same high school, we were made to read his short story, “May Day Eve.” More than that seemingly never-ending opening sentence that captivated me, I genuinely felt that I’d finally found something I can sink my teeth into.

“May Day Eve” as published in Leopoldo Y. Yabes’ anthology of Philippine short stories in English (1941-1955)

The story (in case you haven’t read it, and by way of telling you that You Should, You Should, You Should), is set in 19th century Philippines. I can’t explain why, but I have a strange fascination with the society in that era. I won’t go in depth as to why, except to suggest that this might be because I loved studying history even as an elementary student: the butterfly sleeves, the cobblestone streets–everything that Joaquin described in that relentless sentence, I found I was quite in love with.

The first sentence of the story ends just above my bookmark

Still, as in life between (and well outside) the lines, I found that a deeper political belief simmered just beneath the sweet spell of words strung together by [semi-] colons, dashes, and commas. In my first year of college, I was properly introduced to Nick Joaquin’s views on local history and literature, and where I once again picked up a copy of The Woman Who Had Two Navels–this time, to take it up for class.

Then again, what use is it to write about a novel I clearly already love? More recently, I read Joaquin’s Cave and Shadows. The premise, I promise you, is nothing but intriguing. Jack Henson returns to Manila to solve the mystery behind the death of his ex-wife’s daughter in a cave. Between the first chapter and the last, you’ll meet characters of august political lineage, a modern-day priestess who insists on the return of paganism-as-salvation, and goons ready to run down anyone who spills the beans on their big boss.

But the denouement and the ending both, in my opinion, disappoint.

I found that though the reason behind the daughter’s death was logical enough, many threads introduced in the novel were suddenly dropped. Maybe this was necessary as, being a mystery novel, false leads eventually had to be dropped. Truth to tell, I think this is just me-as-reader being disappointed that the many layers of the myth of the Hermana (as well as other significant socio-religious females) didn’t play a more concrete role in the key to the mystery.

The combination that means a good evening

You know what’s funny, though?

Once I finished the novel, I couldn’t understand how readily I subscribed to the events and characters in the novel: how instantaneously I accepted the idea of an almost military-type pagan group backed by a politician; how almost greedily I gobbled up the myth of a cave that could cause so much filial strife and national intrigue. And I look at society now and I have to admit, I’m a little less puzzled, having now figured that these things in the novel were but hyperbolic expressions of elements we can find even today.

Because in the end, that is truly what I love about Nick Joaquin. More than his eloquence in arguing his points about history or his storytelling prowess, he possesses that inherent ability to create a nearly fantastic world within the mundane Metro that you see everyday. He’ll write a sentence about the state of narrow side streets and not only will you find yourself agreeing that we’re all turning our noses up and pretending not to smell our own filth, we’re also travelling in the throbbing veins of a city that thrives in the occult, the Roman Catholic, the morally perverse, and the generations-strong, landlord-ruled political system.

Paco sensed an unreality in both worlds: the people who occupied them did not seem to be living there at all. They denied the locale–but their denial was not the asceticism of the mystic nor the vision of the reformer, but merely the aversion of the opium eater. They stepped over reality as they stepped across their gutters–with the transient frown of the tourist, the neutral disgust of the foreigner…

One might have to eat cold rice and squat on a pail in the outhouse and sleep on a bug-ridden floor: one sighed and pressed a scented handkerchief to one’s nose and invoked the vicarious magic of one’s wrist-watch (just what all the Wall Street tycoons are wearing now) or of one’s evening dress (just what all the New York hostesses are wearing now) against the cold rice, the rank pail, the buggy floor…One smiled and floated away, insulated from all the drab horror of inadequate reality by the ultra-perfect, colossal, stupendous, technicolored magnificence of the Great American Dream.

-Joaquin, The Woman Who Had Two Navels, p. 47-48 (The Bookmark Inc. copy)

(And it takes more than a whit of wit in order not to romanticize it all)

Where Ms. Lanot calls him “Dahling Nick”

But on a more personal level, I now more clearly love Nick Joaquin because I have realized how he assures me that the stories told by my parents about their past (which, I will admit, bored me as a child), are not mere instances of nostalgia. In reading him, I feel closer to the stories my father tells me about city streets that were once grass fields, of a boy walking to school on a hot day, of a narrow road that leads to a rowdy neighborhood that boasts of two churches, rows of sleeping drivers on sun-warmed tricycles, and a Chowking to boot.

In the fantasy of Joaquin, I find that the place I live in becomes more substantial, without having to sacrifice the bittersweet reality of a history built on many a contradiction–and in my case, that includes all the irony of being part of this country’s middle class.

Nine years after my first foray into his writing and I’m still in awe.

–

Well what do you know; another non-review.