Fat, cranky and worth it
January 23, 2006 | 12:00am
Gutsy is the editor of Philstar.com’s official gaming website, Starcade at www.starcade.com.ph.)
Sonni Viudez’s Fat, Cranky and Full of It is an anthology of 33 essays covering a disparate, diverse range of topics from the sublime to the mundane, the erudite to the ephemeral.
Written in a breezy, conversational style, Viudez tackles a wide-range of topics with robust and ribald humor to go with a point to make (well, some of the time). From chronicling the disentranced miasma of being a child of the ’80s to dealing with a DVD player with a cosmic inside joke to tell, Viudez cracks open his mind like a neurotic piñata for readers to pore over, full of treats bitter, sweet and sour.
Viudez borrows promisingly from the self-effacing vitriolism of the Davids – namely humorists/essayists David Sedaris, Rakoff, and Eggers. What makes Viudez’s book stand out is its deeply, enthusiastically Filipino. All the essays, many of them autobiographical, are set in either Manila or his home province of Malampangan, Bulacan.
It’s refreshing and deeply warming to read a writer whose Philippines doesn’t read like a transplanted, amorphous Americaville, where Quiapo might as well be Chelsea, New York with the names changed, full of witty banter and situation comedy that is funny and observational, yes, but wholly devoid of realism. Reading works like "Fast Times at St. Paul High," in which Viudez bravely and comically traces his way back to his high school stomping grounds, and "Kwentong Barbero," where he muses on the strange but soothing mores of the Filipino barbershop, and you can’t help but be drawn in by a Philippines as real as fish-balls crumpling into a pool of grease.
The shop smelled of old talcum powder," he writes in "Barbero." "Talc was a cure for everything then: for the heat, for the itchy sensation of hair on one’s face or nape, and for masking the smell of damp hair scattered on the floor."
It works, also, because Viudez, while compulsively sarcastic, is never snarky. He has a mollifying sincerity that makes him relatable, even sympathetic. One of Viudez’s most engaging pieces, for example, is "Mai-oh-Mai," in which he narrates his distant, ethereal, unrequited love for socialite Mai-Mai Cojuangco, with whom he attended college. Even though they shared the occasional class together, Viudez, by his own machinations, never actually talked to Mai-Mai; or rather he did, though as Viudez will no doubt tell you himself, conversation is hardly the word to describe what transpired. "Mai-oh-Mai" works in large part because of a rather unique apposition of talents.
This is a writer who is at his unerring, self-assured best when writing, ironically, about his most embarrassing, awkward and self-paralyzing moments: "She gave me a warm ‘Hey’ and tried to strike up a conversation by asking how I was doing…" he writes of his malapropos encounter with Mai-Mai. "I don’t remember much about what I actually said, save that I sounded very much like Gonzo reciting lines of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I think I even used a dirty word or two." If humiliation were a drink, Viudez would be the guy spiking the punch bowl.
For Viudez, though, there is more than just the unscalable wall of first impressions to overcome. "While some of my friends who were all either secretly or openly in love with her through our college years managed to get chummy with Mai-Mai, I hid from every opportunity of doing so. I guess I was simply terrified of losing something important if I did not." Deep down, Viudez knows the Mai-Mai of his imagination can never compare to the flesh and blood one, that his idea of her, perfect and eternally mysterious, can only be ruined by reality. It’s a theme he revisits later in "Chasing Cindy Kurleto," in which he goes out of his way to meet the eponymous celebrity starlet, only to belatedly realize that some things, like unexplored attraction, are best left alone.
It might seem like Viudez holds an almost Victorian regard for women, delicate, diaphanous creatures to be worshipped from afar. On the contrary, one of the things you’ll quickly realize reading Fat, Cranky and Full of It is that Viudez is a man of stark contradictions.
"In As Good A Mystery as Any," "Speaking for the Rest of My Kind" and "The Lady Doth Protest Too Much," Viudez unveils a misogynistic, cavalier attitude towards women’s lib that can be pointed and shocking to the distaff set. He is unapologetic in his belief that women are high-maintenance, self-centered and hypocritical (to be fair, he also admits they’re worth all the trouble).
In "Mystery," he muses, "Women, by constant repetition, convince themselves that they prefer men with a great sense of humor. This, of course, is not true. Most women would go for some doofus who can only reach ‘K’ when asked to recite the alphabet, so long as he looks like Brendan Fraser in George of the Jungle, not in Dudley-do-Right."
It’s this kind of loopy irreverence that ricochets through many of his essays – sentimental yet sardonic, chauvinistic yet austerely becoming, liberal yet old-fashioned, simultaneously high and low brow, as likely to pontificate about the hyperbolic, consumerist machinery behind the Harry Potter phenomena He comes across as the middle brother between the avuncular Garrison Keillor and Animal House’s Bluto, especially when sharing his affinity for porn and his bodily misadventures, like swallowing vomit and getting surgically violated in his nether regions three times (about three times more than readers need to know).
In the end, Fat, Cranky and Full of It is a testament to that old, wise, truism: never judge a book by its cover. That, readers, is what book reviews are for.
Sonni Viudez’s Fat, Cranky and Full of It is an anthology of 33 essays covering a disparate, diverse range of topics from the sublime to the mundane, the erudite to the ephemeral.
Written in a breezy, conversational style, Viudez tackles a wide-range of topics with robust and ribald humor to go with a point to make (well, some of the time). From chronicling the disentranced miasma of being a child of the ’80s to dealing with a DVD player with a cosmic inside joke to tell, Viudez cracks open his mind like a neurotic piñata for readers to pore over, full of treats bitter, sweet and sour.
Viudez borrows promisingly from the self-effacing vitriolism of the Davids – namely humorists/essayists David Sedaris, Rakoff, and Eggers. What makes Viudez’s book stand out is its deeply, enthusiastically Filipino. All the essays, many of them autobiographical, are set in either Manila or his home province of Malampangan, Bulacan.
It’s refreshing and deeply warming to read a writer whose Philippines doesn’t read like a transplanted, amorphous Americaville, where Quiapo might as well be Chelsea, New York with the names changed, full of witty banter and situation comedy that is funny and observational, yes, but wholly devoid of realism. Reading works like "Fast Times at St. Paul High," in which Viudez bravely and comically traces his way back to his high school stomping grounds, and "Kwentong Barbero," where he muses on the strange but soothing mores of the Filipino barbershop, and you can’t help but be drawn in by a Philippines as real as fish-balls crumpling into a pool of grease.
The shop smelled of old talcum powder," he writes in "Barbero." "Talc was a cure for everything then: for the heat, for the itchy sensation of hair on one’s face or nape, and for masking the smell of damp hair scattered on the floor."
It works, also, because Viudez, while compulsively sarcastic, is never snarky. He has a mollifying sincerity that makes him relatable, even sympathetic. One of Viudez’s most engaging pieces, for example, is "Mai-oh-Mai," in which he narrates his distant, ethereal, unrequited love for socialite Mai-Mai Cojuangco, with whom he attended college. Even though they shared the occasional class together, Viudez, by his own machinations, never actually talked to Mai-Mai; or rather he did, though as Viudez will no doubt tell you himself, conversation is hardly the word to describe what transpired. "Mai-oh-Mai" works in large part because of a rather unique apposition of talents.
This is a writer who is at his unerring, self-assured best when writing, ironically, about his most embarrassing, awkward and self-paralyzing moments: "She gave me a warm ‘Hey’ and tried to strike up a conversation by asking how I was doing…" he writes of his malapropos encounter with Mai-Mai. "I don’t remember much about what I actually said, save that I sounded very much like Gonzo reciting lines of Percy Bysshe Shelley. I think I even used a dirty word or two." If humiliation were a drink, Viudez would be the guy spiking the punch bowl.
For Viudez, though, there is more than just the unscalable wall of first impressions to overcome. "While some of my friends who were all either secretly or openly in love with her through our college years managed to get chummy with Mai-Mai, I hid from every opportunity of doing so. I guess I was simply terrified of losing something important if I did not." Deep down, Viudez knows the Mai-Mai of his imagination can never compare to the flesh and blood one, that his idea of her, perfect and eternally mysterious, can only be ruined by reality. It’s a theme he revisits later in "Chasing Cindy Kurleto," in which he goes out of his way to meet the eponymous celebrity starlet, only to belatedly realize that some things, like unexplored attraction, are best left alone.
It might seem like Viudez holds an almost Victorian regard for women, delicate, diaphanous creatures to be worshipped from afar. On the contrary, one of the things you’ll quickly realize reading Fat, Cranky and Full of It is that Viudez is a man of stark contradictions.
"In As Good A Mystery as Any," "Speaking for the Rest of My Kind" and "The Lady Doth Protest Too Much," Viudez unveils a misogynistic, cavalier attitude towards women’s lib that can be pointed and shocking to the distaff set. He is unapologetic in his belief that women are high-maintenance, self-centered and hypocritical (to be fair, he also admits they’re worth all the trouble).
In "Mystery," he muses, "Women, by constant repetition, convince themselves that they prefer men with a great sense of humor. This, of course, is not true. Most women would go for some doofus who can only reach ‘K’ when asked to recite the alphabet, so long as he looks like Brendan Fraser in George of the Jungle, not in Dudley-do-Right."
It’s this kind of loopy irreverence that ricochets through many of his essays – sentimental yet sardonic, chauvinistic yet austerely becoming, liberal yet old-fashioned, simultaneously high and low brow, as likely to pontificate about the hyperbolic, consumerist machinery behind the Harry Potter phenomena He comes across as the middle brother between the avuncular Garrison Keillor and Animal House’s Bluto, especially when sharing his affinity for porn and his bodily misadventures, like swallowing vomit and getting surgically violated in his nether regions three times (about three times more than readers need to know).
In the end, Fat, Cranky and Full of It is a testament to that old, wise, truism: never judge a book by its cover. That, readers, is what book reviews are for.
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