A ‘rested’ development
When I mentioned that I was going to a Tempur event, my office colleague got all excited and insisted that he join me, as there were some products he had been dying to check out. While I knew Tempur by name, that it carried pillows and mattresses that boasted of being the latest in design for sleep, comfort and rest, I wasn’t aware of just how fervent its coterie of clients and “believers” were.
Originating from and recognized by NASA, the mattress and pillow line of Tempur boasts of moulding perfectly to the contours of one’s body, distributing weight evenly; thus relieving pressure points, and providing minimal counter pressure to one’s body. The Tempur pillows and mattresses promise to reduce the tossing and turning one normally associates with sleep by at least 80 percent; they also increase blood circulation, and improve sleep quality. There’s a demo module in the company’s Boni High Street store that acts like some “show and tell” for the merits of the line, and given that we’re talking about rest and sleep, the funny thing is that I was already wishing the 10-to-15 minute demo time frame it mentioned would extend to hours, if all the claims it made would hold true. I’m a very light sleeper, and to make matters worse, it takes me hours from the moment I hit the sack to actually fall asleep.
True to its NASA origins, the demo simulates being taken on some space exploration voyage, but this time out, we are being guided to the deep recesses of the universe, that region where truly restful and “serene oblivion” sleep can be discovered. A place where sleep translates to night-time renewal of body and mind, where back and neck pains disappear. I know it may sound like the first two minutes of an episode of Star Trek, but as the mattress began to make adjustments to my body weight and the pillow just seemed to envelope and caress my head, I was ready to rechristen myself the “Pinoy Rip Van Winkle.” Check out the Boni High Street store and see what I mean!
Distributed by Stephen Sy’s Focus Global, Inc., there’s also a Tempur shop on the fifth level of Shangri-La Mall, and at the S&R branch at the Fort. Design and technology have certainly come together for something as basic and human as sleep in the form of Tempur. Considering that close to a third of our lives is spent in the state of sleep, it’s comforting to know that Tempur is truly a Restful Development.
Family matters
These three novels turn the concept of family on its head, giving us rich narratives and thought-provoking questions about what family can mean in a dysfunctional context. Steve Toltz is a fresh, young Australian writer, while Junot Diaz hails from the
A Fraction of the Whole by Steve Toltz (available at Powerbooks): This is Toltz’ first novel, and it’s a very polished, accomplished debut, one that has several critics sitting up and taking notice. A sprawling, twisted Aussie family saga, the novel revolves around the lives of Jasper Dean, his father Martin and Jasper’s stepbrother, Terry. There’s a spiritual symmetry between Jason and his father, one of the true outcasts of conventional society, and always overhanging, is the shadow of Terry, something of a modern-day Ned Kelley of the sports world. A gifted natural athlete, who’s completely obsessed with the idea of fair play and the ethics of competition, when injury befalls Terry and he has to give up sports, he becomes a vigilante for principled sports, wreaking poetic justice on athletes he feels are tainting the arena. Writing about Jasper’s Polish grandmother and how she arrives in
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz (available at The Different Bookstore): This first novel by Junot Diaz had me gnashing my teeth in frustration. Well-received by critics all over the world, this novel of Diaz’ reads very much like what I would have expected that first great Filipino contemporary novel to be like. Using his Dominican Republic heritage, and his having grown up in New York City, Diaz creates an attractive and fascinating story that criss-crosses between the two locales, interspersing history lessons, magical realism, and a cast of larger-than-life, but always sympathetic, characters. After his short story collection, Drown, it’s good to see Diaz still at peak form. This is family lore as literature, using histiography as a jump-off point for a colorful and engrossing journey. There’s Oscar, an overweight, repressed, romantic, who wants nothing more than to be the JRR Tolkien of Paterson, New Jersey. There’s Lola, his sister, who has her own tale to tell; and shadowing the two, there are the secrets of their mother. The desperation and hopes of Oscar’s life and family becomes the stuff of miracles in Diaz’ hands.
Homecoming by Bernard Schlink (available at Fully Booked): Author of The Reader, Schlink starts off this new novel of discovery and family with our protagonist’s visits to his grandparents in a Swiss village. With grandparents as editors of serial novels, our “hero” discovers a story of a World War II German soldier returning from a Russian prison camp and discovering his wartime wife now has a new husband and two children. Not knowing how this homecoming story ends becomes the impetus for what follows. The search to find the writer of this story leads to discovering his long lost father, and the diaspora of Germans after World War II becomes a secondary strand running through this novel. There are parallels to theories of jurisprudence and Homer’s Odyssey thrown in to add texture and “gravitas” to this novel that leaves thoughtful and penetrating questions about identity and family history. There’s even this strange, yet compelling, episode in an upstate
