Gift books for Christmas

Launched on Nov. 17 at the Ateneo Professional Schools in Rockwell Center was a book of short stories that I hereby vouch for — as a fine collectible, and an excellent gift for the season, for literate friends or oneself.

Stories From Another Time by Benjamin Bautista, published by Ateneo de Manila University Press, is, indeed, just that: of and from a time so poignant in its passing, because it was simpler, cleaner (or what the author recalls as “the awkward, artless innocence of the time”), yet rife with the clear joys of excellence in living and appreciating what came along by way of appreciable treasures — such as these stories.

Ben Bautista, hail-fellow-well-met and a maestro of short fiction, does everyone a favor by setting his exemplary produce of the 1950s and 1960s between covers. Seventeen stories sparkle with lucidity and simplicity, shorn of any adornments — the way, say, Jose “Pete” Lacaba’s poems in both English and Filipino regale us sans vacuous embroidery or distended ambiguity. 

That both were of the Ateneo (with Lacaba appreciably a junior vis-a-vis Bautista) speaks well of the quality of literary mentors they had, mayhap starting with Fr. Horacio de la Costa — whom Bautista remembers to have served as a juror when his first story, written when he was 16, came out in Heights and “was judged to be the second best story of 1954.”

On an aside, for Lacaba, it must have been a triumvirate of stalwarts that helped shape his aesthetics: Rolando Tinio, Emmanuel Torres, and Bienvenido Lumbera, two of these eventually declared as National Artists. Throw in Antonio Manuud and Vladimir Olaguer. 

Yet another literary eagle from the same aerie, Gregorio C. Brillantes, writes in his foreword that “These Filipino ‘stories from another time’ are among the finest ever written in the world of the short story.” 

No argument. Brillantes knows whereof he attests. Much like a sidekick in a proselytizing duo out on the streets in short-sleeved polo shirt and tie, I can only nod and say, “Verily, verily, I aver that.”

But let’s leave it to Greg to carry on with the encomiums: “(T)here is the sense in (Bautista’s) short stories of an easy competence, a casual, unrehearsed performance... Remarkably, the seeming effortlessness generated stories of the highest order, in vision and resonance, matter and form and prose; in felicities of language that recall Nick Joaquin, Renato Madrid and Kerima Polotan, who once remarked of Bautista: ‘This fellow can write a terrific story — with his left foot.’”

Here’s sharing an excerpt from the Daniel Day-Lewis of Philippine literature: 

“When he had gone I went to my room and I shut the door. I was all alone but I felt as if someone else were in the room, a stranger I didn’t like very much. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. The whole week since Papa died seemed to have been one long day, unmarked by the passing of hours. Now it was almost over and I was very tired. Judge Marfil had told the truth. The boy was my father’s son. His mother was dead. She had been Papa’s mistress for a long time. Isabel had known everything but she kept it all from me. She had protected me. Now that Papa was dead his son had come to us. Maybe he didn’t know what else he could do. He was fifteen, two years younger than I was. He was my father’s son.

“I accepted the fact without feeling. It was as if I were not involved at all. I had no part in it. I did not even feel sorry for myself because how could you feel sorry for yourself if you didn’t quite know who you were?

“The door opened and Isabel came in. She sat down on my bed and held my hand as if I were a little boy. She said nothing and I sat up and she took me in her arms and suddenly I felt a terrible sense of loss and it was not entirely because of Papa’s death. Isabel pressed my head again her breasts and they felt soft and warm and wet with tears, and it was then that I realized that I had been crying.”

Simple, effective prose. More so than efficient, or just competent. All those clean, clear lines eschew the temptation of what’s dubbed as “language writing” or the razzle-dazzle heretofore practiced by eventual false idols whom the eminent Juaniyo Arcellana and I used to share a weakness for, other than highland or island malts. 

Bautista’s stories are real stories. He has something to say, narrate, hold up as genuine emotion or universal truth. He doesn’t just utter, mutter or stutter, as a pose. His prose neither bewilders nor lures a reader to any dark abyss. It performs in the light, quietly honors stories of all time.

Received recently from the University of Hong Kong Press is an important volume titled Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives, edited by Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista and Kingsley Bolton.

Part of a series on “Asian Englishes Today” which “provide a contemporary record of English language and literature in South, Southeast, and East Asia, this academic anthology comes in four parts that offer sociolinguistic context, linguistic descriptions of the features of Philippine English, the literary creativity of Philippine writers in English, and a research bibliography.

Among the contributors of scholarly essays are co-editor Bautista (University fellow and professor emerita of English and applied linguistics at De La Salle University); the late lamented Bro. Andrew Gonzalez, FSC; Allan B. I. Bernardo; Danilo T. Dayag; T. Ruanni F. Tupas, D.V.S. Manarpaac, Vicente L. Rafael (on “Taglish, or the phantom power of the lingua franca”); Ma. Lourdes G. Taytao, Isabel Pefianco Martin (“Colonial education and the shaping of Philippine literature in English”); Lily Rose Tope (“Negotiating language: Postcolonialism and nationalism in Philippine literature in English”); Gémino H. Abad (“‘This scene so fair’: Filipino English poetry, 1905-2005”); Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo (“The Philippine short story in English: An overview”); Caroline S. Hau (“The Filipino novel in English”); Alfred A. Yuson (“Filipino diasporic literature”); and Simeon Dumdum, Timothy Mo, and Resil Mojares in collaboration (“In conversation: Cebuano writers in Philippine literature and English”).

All of 405 pages, hardbound, the book may be ordered at the published price of HK$395, by e-mailing hkupress@hku.hk or faxing to (852) 287-50734.

Libraries, English departments of educational institutions, and call centers can’t do without this book. Not for this or any other Christmas.

As we say in Pinoyese, “Cheers!”