For beginners and those who have already started on their way to life

The human spirit is a study in polarity. It knows what is good yet it may also subscribe to anything that is evil. It is both hot and cold, happy and sad, heavy and light. It knows that happiness and suffering are a paradoxically strange but inseparable couple; that the absence of one becomes the fulfillment of the other. Yet neither of the thwarting forces has the monopoly over the human spirit. Life alone is not lived through and through. An inevitable end in the form of death has to come. Yet, even in death, life springs anew.

That life is both strange and familiar, serious and comical surfaces in the thoughts of Dr. Ricardo Suarez Soler, a psychiatrist and an ex-journalist. He gathered his thoughts — and creative inertia — and gave birth to a collection of short stories he called For Starters. Each of the 10 stories in the book dissects the intricateness of the human spirit, in particular the Filipino psyche.

Like a spark plug that instantaneously ignites, each short story contained in Soler’s For Starters is combustible in nature. The plots are woven intricately, bearing the brunt of seamless exposition. The conflicts in his stories are simple in nature but they get complex as one reads along. Soler just knows when to stop the exploration of his narratives and characters and delivers the flammable punch in the ending, leaving the reader bothered and consoled, consumed and comforted, emotions that more than foreshadow that the reader has had an intelligently satisfying read.

Long after reading the story of Manny and his self-inflicted death in The Swan Song, I can still feel the steak knife inserted between his ribs, right through his heart — the center of his system where, for the first time after carrying on non-serious dalliances with a swing and shower of girls, he kept his love, for the very first time, for a mortal whom he treated like divinity. That he bled mostly from within is symbolic enough that up to his last moment, he denied himself of the liberty to love freely — accepting the fact that he was not the first man to be intimately related to the woman he married. The purists will blame Manny, a doctor, for thinking that love is as thin as a woman’s hymen; and as fleeting as a man’s first instinct for carnal desire. He may have known love when he first met Ysabel but hubris rules over him and forgets that the efficacy of love is in total submission of oneself to another — accepting one another wholly, faults, warts and all.

The temperament of Soler’s language captures the everyday nuances of the Filipino character — rich or poor, erudite or untaught, sophisticated or gauche, enlightened or prejudiced. The poignant drama is present in his every work yet it does not manipulate the total passion of his stories. Having said that, expect, too, that humor is present in his tales that serves its purpose akin to the after taste of a jigger of tequila after licking the salt. Like a Greek comedy, tragedy precipitates also in Soler’s tales.

Hitler He Only Had One Ball is humorous and apocalyptical. The humor in the chant — “Hitler, he only had one ball, Gering had two but very small; Himler had something better but poor old Gebels had nothing at all” —presages the life that will unfold for the flat-broke character whose only temporary chance to survive, if he will afterwards, is to have one of his kidneys donated to a very rich recipient. And when the price of one kidney will not suffice to see him and his family through, will he also cajole his two daughters to donate theirs?

Out of Sight is a beautiful discussion of sex in a different milieu — fused with finesse, but still, flavored by desire. It posits on love and how else love can be explored by further enhancing a couple’s sex life. Most especially if the couple involved is both blind.

Having spoken about my thoughts on his three stories, there are still seven more substantially good tales in Soler’s first venture in collecting his short stories. His thoughts are fearless and provoking. His book, if there is a word, is “unputdownable.”

I have started reading it again.

(For Starters is available in all the leading bookstores nationwide. E-mail me at bumbaki@yahoo.com or my.new.beginnings@gmail.com. Have a blessed Sunday!)