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Para kay B 13/10/2010
 
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Ricky Lee's Para Kay B (o Kung Paano Dinevastate ng Pag-ibig ang 4 Out of 5 sa Atin) (Loyola Heights, Quezon City: Writers Studio Philippines, 2008; 250 pages) had been gathering dust on my shelf a year after I bought it.

I had been putting off reading it because: (1) it is written in Filipino, and my colonial education goes into autopilot when it comes to choosing what book next to read; (2) I have been busy with teaching and administrative tasks, though that didn't stop me from reading Gina Apostol's The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata -- which is written in English and which I bought around the same time; (3) I harbored some doubts about Ricky Lee's first venture into the novel format, especially because I know him for his screenplays, reportage, short stories, and scriptwriting manual.

And what a surprise it was when I finally got around to reading it a few months back. Like what the film director Joyce Bernal says in her blurb for the novel, I read it cover to cover in just one sitting. Well, I have to admit that Ricky Lee writes very good characters in whatever format he chooses.

The novel tells the love stories of Irene, Sandra, Erica, Ester, and Bessie. As well as Lucas the writer, who is the meta-narrator as well as the author of the "Para Kay B" (that's what the photo of the brown envelope printed on the title page presumably contains). So who among these characters succeed in love?

There's Irene with the photographic memory, Sandra with the keenest sense for fairness, Erica from the place where people do not feel anything, Ester who discovers passion on a roof, and Bessie to whom the manuscript "Para kay B" is dedicated. And there's Lucas. 

There'll be no spoilers here, so you might as well get yourself a copy and read who gets their true love. Knowing how the plot turns out is really just the icing on the cake. The novel is really more than just a series of love stories.

For one thing, the Taglish (it's not really Filipino we read here) makes the reading so easy. And, when you get to the last two chapters where the narrative threads tighten, you will feel your heart quicken. Especially that last chapter where the novel turns meta and Para Kay B becomes a quasi-treatise on writing and writing in a country where no one seems to read books.

Quite a challenging read it was. Can't wait for Ricky Lee's next novel Aswang, a sample of which can be found at the end of the book.
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Benjamin Pimentel's Mga Gerilya sa Powell St. (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2007; 223 pp.) won the 2007 National Book Award for Fiction.

It tells the stories of Filipino WWII veterans who migrated to the US, hoping that they would live to see the day the Equity Bill would be enacted into law.

The novel follows the lives of Fidel, Ruben, and Ciriaco as they hang out near the BART station along Powell St. or in several parks around the city of San Francisco or in their tiny apartments when the weather gets so freezing cold for their Filipino hide. They pass the time joshing with each other or other Filipino veterans and homeless Americans or reminiscing about their lives back in the Philippines.

The novel, written in Filipino, is made up of four chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter, "Ang Makauwi nang Buo," sets up the novel's structure that revolves around the veterans' fear of being brought back to the Philippines in an urn -- and last three chapters narrate just that: the deaths and cremation of Ciriaco, Ruben, and Fidel. That seems to be the book's message: that these WWII veterans will have passed away before America makes good on its promise.

The novel, however, is not really just about the veterans' struggles for recognition. Rather, it presents the hardships these veterans face in America. Except for some fellow Filipino-Americans, like Atty. Anne Dizon, the veterans fall prey to the unscrupulous among their fellow Filipino immigrants (Rose for Ciriaco, and Mauricio and his wife for the Major). But most of all, what these veterans fear most in that alien place is loneliness. So they pass their time shooting the breeze or feeding the pigeons at Powell Street rather than be alone with their memories of the war of their home country.

This is true for Ruben who had to abandon his dead brother's body in the jungles so his troop could escape from the Japanese. This is also true for Fidel, whose son was falsely accused by his comrades for being a DPA (deep penetration agent) and was never seen again.

But the alternative, to go back to the homeland without the promised benefits of the Equity Bill, would also be another defeat for these veterans. For back home, the country is continually caught up in social, political, and economic disarray.
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January 2009 staging by Tanghalang Pilipino, CCP
Despite the serious and depressing theme, Boying Pimentel is able to infuse a sense of hope for these cast of characters. It is in how Pimentel lets the characters speak for themselves that we see their resilience and unflagging optimisim (okay, every now and then they get depressed). Even Ruben, who seems inconsolable after Ciriaco's death, bounces back and finds himself an immigrant Russian woman for a girlfriend.

I would like to see Rody Vera's stage adaptation of the novel, seen here in Tanghalang Pilipino's restaging of the play in 2009 (thanks to Gibbs Cadiz's blog for the photo). While the novel was engaging, I think a stage adaptation would make Pimentel's characters more appealing. I can imagine how these characters on the page will banter onstage, or how they will grieve as they scatter the ashes of their buddies against a backdrop of the Golden Gate Bridge. 

That is how I hear the novel onstage the theater in my head.
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This was supposed to be bedside reading. Bad idea. Couldn't put it down soon as I got about a third into the book. But then, I should have realized that Nick Bantock just doesn't offer you a visual feast but also regale you with an intriguing tale.

The first time I came across Nick Bantock's name was when a friend got a copy of Griffin and Sabine, the bestselling epistolary novel as reinvented by the author. This was way back in 1991. I was blown away by the artwork, with the story literally unfolding as the reader goes through page after page of postcards and letters tucked in their envelopes. And it was no gimmick, too, as the "exotic" imagery of the postcards and letters fit neatly into the mysterious correspondence between the characters.

While The Venetian's Wife (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1996) involves less reader interactivity -- with the catalogs and other artwork neatly incorporated into regular pages -- it is no less the visual treat and compelling novel.

You should get yourself a copy as I'm not giving any spoilers.

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Blindness 28/02/2010
 
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Finally got to sit down and watch Fernando Meirelles's Blindness (2008). I often wondered how he would transform the apocalyptic world Jose Saramago created in his novel.

I wasn't disappointed at all. Julianne Moore was magnificent in her portrayal of the Doctor's Wife -- letting us feel what she was thinking and feeling in that wretched world that she alone was the sole witness. Through the intensity in her eyes and by how her jaw would be clenched tight, she could as well be mute as the only seeing person in a city where all the people had become blind.

I didn't like Gael Garcia Bernal being cast as the King of Ward 3, though. While he delivered quite a good performance, he didn't quite fit the character I imagined when reading the book. He looked really frail to be the King of Ward 3. Of course, that may be what Meirelles intended -- in a world where no one is able to see anything, size is not necessarily might.

And of course, my having read Saramago's novel Blindness (1995) may have clouded my lenses while watching the movie.
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Such a timely read it was then, what with the news about Influenza A H1N1 all over the papers. And with the alarming warnings of pandemic proportions. While there was cause for concern, some of the serious stuff was glossed over by the sensationalized reporting -- moreso on TV. Some of the reports even quoted government and health officials talking about the need to call in the military.

Which brings me to the novel, Blindness (1995), and how it portrays a city and country turning into a version of Hell as one by one the citizens are struck blind. The first few who lost their sight are quarantined in an abandoned mental asylum, with the military keeping watch so that no one escapes to infect others.

But soon everybody, inside and outside the quarantine, are struck blind. And soon humanity becomes its own nightmare. Except for a group of individuals led by a woman, the Doctor's Wife (no name is given her in the novel), who wasn't afflicted with the sudden blindness.

She becomes the only witness to the degradation around her, and sometimes she wishes that she were blind too. But ultimately, she is able to lead her group to a kind of sight -- a kind of hopefulness that lives on in everyone who doesn't forget their humanity.

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For Raymundo Mata is a footnote in the annals of the Katipunan, the Philippine revolutionary group that fought for independence against Spain and later America.

He is mentioned only in passing: "On June 15, 1896, Dr. Valenzuela left Manila aboard the steamer Venus. To disguise his real mission, he brought with him a blind man named Raymundo Mata and a guide, going to Dapitan to seek Rizal's expert medical service."

But Gina Apostol recuperates this character in her recent novel, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, 2009). She lets Raymundo Mata speak for himself through what is purported to be his notebooks or, as the historian Estrella Espejo describes it, more of "an assortment of unpaginated notes and mismatched sheaves packed in a ratty biscuit tin and stuffed in a tattered medical bag, the edges of the papers curled up in permanent dust" (2).

The translation, done by Mimi Magsalin (pseud.), is divided into five parts that chronicles Mata's childhood in Cavite and later involvement with the revolutionary group. Part 3 of his notebooks contain entries that reveals Mata's encounters with Jose Rizal in Dapitan. The fourth part revolves around Mata's dark secret as well as clues to the whereabouts of the Katipunan's money, while the last part titled "Aftermass" reads like Rizal's unfinished novel Makamisa.

Espejo is handed this manuscript, rather the translation of Mata's notebooks, by the publisher Trina Trono. Overcome with the potential significance of this historical document, she shares her thoughts and the translated manuscript with Diwata Drake, a Murkian scholar who had published chapters of her forthcoming tome You Lovely Symptoms: The Structure of the Filipino Unconscious, Not Really a Langue or a Parole.

Equally overwhelmed by this historical find, Drake becomes engrossed in reading the manuscript that she becomes oblivious of Espejo's near fatal attack (though Espejo believes Drake tried to smother her in her sleep). The short of it is that Espejo is confined to the Quezon Institute and Sanitorium in Tacloban, Leyte, while Drake roams around the world (like a fugitive, perhaps?).

But such is the drama of Philippine scholarship it seems, or what the novel seems to mimic.
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As Ambeth Ocampo relates in Makamisa: The Search for Rizal's Third Novel (Pasig City: Anvil Publishing, 1992), he stumbled upon Rizal's text from the marginalia often swept aside by official chroniclers of the National Hero. Apparently Dr. Angel Hidalgo, Rizal's grandnephew and a scholar who compiled an annotated bibliography of Rizal's works, alerted the Jose Rizal National Centennial Commission (JRNCC) about "an unpublished manuscript in Spanish resembling the Tagalog Makamisa in plot and characters, and existing in the National Library" (18). 

Hidalgo suggested that the existing manuscript be "transcribed, translated, and published." However, Hidalgo was silenced by his uncle, "Leoncio Lopez Rizal, the acknowledged authority on Rizal and a member of the JRNCC...by declaring, 'No se puede por que el manuscrito es un borrador. Un borrador del Noli me tangere, nada mas!' (That cannot be done, because the manuscript in question is a draft. A draft of the Noli me tangere, nothing more!)" [translation provided] (18).

And so Rizal's third novel remained buried among other manuscripts in the National Library, until Ocampo was able to retrieve it. His transcription and translation is what we now have in his Makamisa: The Search for Rizal's Third Novel.

This same kind of contentious scholarship is what Apostol mimes and mines in her own explorations into the Filipino identity. And what a rollicking heteroglossic carnival she presents us readers. 

For the novel is not just about the footnote figure that is Mata. It also mimics the combative scholarship in the spats among Espejo, Drake, and Magsalin in the footnotes and in the forewords and afterwords to Mata's notebook entries.

It is the footnotes that really propel the novel to its ending that turns out to be, in Espejo's words, really "a circular loop, with same beginning and no end." An ending that thrusts Drake into her own quest to unmask what she suspects to be Magsalin's hoax (abetted by Trono, if she is not herself the pseudonymous translator).

Such is the nature of literary works, it seems. It can inaugurate a revolution just as much as Drake says of biographical texts, it can launch a thousand "false starts, red herrings, dead ends, mysterious trails" that make the quest -- whether for a nation or for the novel's closure -- worth the while. 

Moreso when we can chuckle through the pages, something that Apostol liberally indulges us with in her serious play with rewriting history.

As Magsalin cryptically writes in her postcard from "'an island in the South China Sea'": Mi noamla: ra puada vimgoes am at.

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Bibliomania 16/11/2009
 
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Why do I always get pulled into bookstores?

I was supposed to buy new shirts at the mall when I passed by a bookstore. Next thing I knew, there I was browsing through the titles. Had to stop myself and magicked my two feet to march out the bookstore.

I succeeded in not buying a book, but failed to buy new shirts in my hurry to get back home.

But then, this is nothing new. As a kid, my parents would often scold me for burying my nose in a book rather than doing my chores. They thought I was slacking off. They were right, of course. Reading has always been my escape.

In all the houses or apartments I've stayed in through the years, the clutter of books and magazines would define how the place would be "Home." In the apartment I rent now, one side of my bedroom is filled from floor to ceiling with shelves overflowing with books. Cabinets are stuffed with books and mags that won't fit into the shelves.

Even this blog isn't spared, what with the Amazon Wish List and Shelfari widgets on the sidebar.

Now you know where to look for me at the mall.

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