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dessuarez's reviews
110 reviews
Remains by Daryll Delgado
dark
emotional
5.0
This might now be my favorite Filipino novel written in English simply because it hits home more than anything else.
Like literally. Spatially. Tacloban, where this story is set, is the closest to my hometown that a contemporary Filipino novel has ever come. Four hours from Hilongos, we drove there two days after Yolanda to rescue my Auntie and her two kids who came to live in our house - with no electricity or water - for months to come; I saw the town before and after the storm, and I heard about it from and I saw its effects in my loved ones for years after. This is a vivid story.
In no other story have I had images form as quickly in my head. I did not need to imagine the place, the people, and milieu, I found them as easily as I would have recalled a memory. The way that it is written, with the interview transcripts bearing the actual Waray text for instance, the casual code switching between English and Waray which is exactly how we talk around these parts, and the narrator's compulsion to evoking every smell, only made it even more clear in my head, I can genuinely say it's like I'm actually there, because for a brief, harrowing time, I really was.
And to further my affinity with this book, it is narrated by a UP student, a former activist, and a social worker, roles I have previously played; Even her attitude towards charity and foreigners, to trauma and her own mother is all too familiar to me. And she is a woman, written by a woman, which is very important to me personally, because my experience with the local industry is that it's still very macho, and it's important to me that in fiction Filipino women are represented in a nuanced way which only a Filipino woman herself could ever describe.
This narrator reminds me a lot of one of Caroline Hau's narrators in Tiempo Muerto, and also of Nick Joquin's narrator in Cave and Shadows. They are amateur detectives, in a way, who have come back to their hometown to solve a mystery -- either someone is missing or someone has been murdered or both -- and in the end, the mystery is never solved, the questions never answered. Because the point of these postcolonial murder mysteries is not to solve the mystery, but to discover the conditions which led to a tragedy. I think Daryll did a great job executing that in this book. There is much to chew on at the end, it stays with you, that's what these kinds of books are precisely for.
Having learned that this book was nominated for the National Book Award on the same year that Tiempo Muerto was, I found even more reason to compare the two. They both talk about contemporary issues while "smuggling" (in quotations because these conditions are directly linked to the contemporary issue in question) Martial Law subplots. I really like that about these two. I realized that the only reason I prefer this book over Hau's is because it's in Tacloban, and I've been there, it's close to me, while Hau's Iloilo is not somewhere I am familiar with yet.
It's interesting how space factors into that cognitive process. I'm confident that the same story told in a different town will yield a different experience, because this is not a homogenous nation; I want more books that would illustrate that. I want the literary industry in this country to produce and distribute more books from the regions. And by God I'm gonna try to move that needle in whatever way I can!!!
It's interesting how space factors into that cognitive process. I'm confident that the same story told in a different town will yield a different experience, because this is not a homogenous nation; I want more books that would illustrate that. I want the literary industry in this country to produce and distribute more books from the regions. And by God I'm gonna try to move that needle in whatever way I can!!!
I'm so glad that I read this. I'm going to read it again as soon as I'm able.
Tiempo Muerto by Caroline S. Hau
5.0
Holy fuck, one of the best books I've read from a Filipino writer. Like comparable to Nick Joaquin levels I'm not even joking rn.
Hau's background as a historian and scholar has enabled her to create such an expansive, nuanced, and accurate picture of the archipelago -- with emphasis on its archipelagic nature; this book is distinctively regional, weaving in stories from the islands of Panay, Negros, and Cebu specifically. There must be a name for her method, like world-building but there's a bibliography at the end, and everything is real actually. Everything Hau has somehow been able to thoroughly discuss in this book -- the fiefdoms dating back to Spanish times, the shameless, debauched padrino system, the repression and violence experienced by activists and workers even to this day, the rebellions that resulted from it -- these are not fictional, it's true. She did her damn research and she's got the bibliography to prove it!
I read this because it is categorically a Martial Law novel, but it would be a hundred pages yet before any references to the dictatorship is actually made, and the words Martial Law and dictator are used maybe just 2-4 times in the book. Which is how I know it's a good Martial Law novel, because it depicts the aftermath of that extended period of stagnation, through the lives of OFWs who have had to carry that burden for our nation. The book does not ever mention the Marcoses explicitly and barely even implicitly. This Martial Law novel is about the dictstorship's catalysts and biggest beneficiaries, the crony. The crony who is a landlord, who is heir to a feudal legacy that begun and will end this country, who is a businessman and politician, who has wrought so much destruction for no other reason but greed.
Do not read this as a mystery because that is not the point. You will be disappointed, you must think bigger. The point of the ghosts and crimes in this novel is not to solve or resolve them. The point is precisely to challenge an easy resolution, Bertolt Brecht style. This is a common characteristic of Philippine postmodern fiction (see: Nick Joaquin's Cave and Shadows) as a way to show what postcolonialism looks like not just through figures of speech but through the overall literary design. It's form. It's poetics. Honestly, I would even call it praxis.
Hau's background as a historian and scholar has enabled her to create such an expansive, nuanced, and accurate picture of the archipelago -- with emphasis on its archipelagic nature; this book is distinctively regional, weaving in stories from the islands of Panay, Negros, and Cebu specifically. There must be a name for her method, like world-building but there's a bibliography at the end, and everything is real actually. Everything Hau has somehow been able to thoroughly discuss in this book -- the fiefdoms dating back to Spanish times, the shameless, debauched padrino system, the repression and violence experienced by activists and workers even to this day, the rebellions that resulted from it -- these are not fictional, it's true. She did her damn research and she's got the bibliography to prove it!
I read this because it is categorically a Martial Law novel, but it would be a hundred pages yet before any references to the dictatorship is actually made, and the words Martial Law and dictator are used maybe just 2-4 times in the book. Which is how I know it's a good Martial Law novel, because it depicts the aftermath of that extended period of stagnation, through the lives of OFWs who have had to carry that burden for our nation. The book does not ever mention the Marcoses explicitly and barely even implicitly. This Martial Law novel is about the dictstorship's catalysts and biggest beneficiaries, the crony. The crony who is a landlord, who is heir to a feudal legacy that begun and will end this country, who is a businessman and politician, who has wrought so much destruction for no other reason but greed.
Do not read this as a mystery because that is not the point. You will be disappointed, you must think bigger. The point of the ghosts and crimes in this novel is not to solve or resolve them. The point is precisely to challenge an easy resolution, Bertolt Brecht style. This is a common characteristic of Philippine postmodern fiction (see: Nick Joaquin's Cave and Shadows) as a way to show what postcolonialism looks like not just through figures of speech but through the overall literary design. It's form. It's poetics. Honestly, I would even call it praxis.
Twice Blessed by Ninotchka Rosca
challenging
funny
3.0
I struggled with the pacing here, I think sometimes it interrupts its own momentum, but there are moments of evocative - almost erotic - prose in this. Read this for its lucidity more than anything else. The degree with which Rosca is attuned to the mechanisms of this nation and the satirical flare that she posesses results in a novel that is able to describe the absurdity of how the Philippine government "works" (in quotations because it does not) without downplaying the impact of politicians' absurd techniques which, after all, no matter how fucking stupid or funny they may be, work in gathering support and accumulating power. It's good satire, so good that it's sad, because I live here, and it's too true for me. Genuinely, God bless this nation.
Empire of Memory by Eric Gamalinda
adventurous
funny
reflective
4.0
GREAT book to read in the midst of the second Marcos presidency, one that was won by denying, distorting, and mythologizing Philippine history. Here is a book that bares the mechanisms of how to use narrative to sieze power, and just how much power can be accrued through legend.
But beyond this meta examination of history as fiction and fiction as history, there is the representation of the plural postcolonial nation, with all its unresolved traumas, with all its contradictions, with all its people and all their dreams. How can you describe the Philippines? Only in this postmodern way where many voices, past and present, are talking at the same time, and the truth is elusive, but not unknowable.
What I love about this book is that despite its incessant cynicism, in the end it has hope anyway. There is no other choice; because what can you do when nothing can be done? When the family of thieves we kicked out from Malacañang has come back through the front door with a key we just handed back to them, when the country is run by buffoons, when we know what they're doing with our money?
All there's left to do is hope and to act upon that hope. I never could pin down what being a Filipino means but I think that's the closest I could get. Nobody does hope like us, fuck, 333 years of Spain, and then America, and then Japan, and then America again - for a pretty permanent time, and then a fucking dictator, and then a parade of trapos and balimbings, and then a murderer, and then a murderer's son; by god, we are still here. Not only that, but we are still able to imagine a better world. I hope that one day we will come to live in it.
All there's left to do is hope and to act upon that hope. I never could pin down what being a Filipino means but I think that's the closest I could get. Nobody does hope like us, fuck, 333 years of Spain, and then America, and then Japan, and then America again - for a pretty permanent time, and then a fucking dictator, and then a parade of trapos and balimbings, and then a murderer, and then a murderer's son; by god, we are still here. Not only that, but we are still able to imagine a better world. I hope that one day we will come to live in it.