Three excellent books

My apologies to all the author-friends and publishers who have added weight to my library in the past several months — while the planet seemed to have assumed a faster spin than usual, so that hectic-ity of quotidian matters rose inordinately to a peak towards the yearend holidays.

In brief, so spry, I got too preoccupied to read through all of the wonderful new books that kept coming my way. That’s why it’s been sometime since I last reviewed or plugged Filipiniana titles in this space.

Forgive me further as you must, for now that the Divine Taskmaster has mercifully allowed me a weekend to practice my speed-reading skills on your literary works, I will still have to compress my remarks on a first few of them — all together now. Well, not quite. Let’s see how much today’s space can fit in.

I start with an important novel, Gun Dealer’s Daughter, the third by my good friend and wonderful writer Gina Apostol who has been based for some time in New York City. My hardbound copy was a gift from her, handed personally, signed, with a dedication dated Aug. 3 of last year. That night we dined together with other usual Fil-Am suspects — at the Peruvian Pio Pio resto in Hell’s Kitchen. Now you see why this book takes precedence in this omnibus review. Obviously, Gina took care of the meals and drinks bill that night, as we were in her very own neighborhood.

Published by the reputable W.W. Norton & Company, Gina’s novel has done exceedingly well in the US, earning her positive reviews and reading/signing tours. Fellow Asian-American author Han Ong blurbs: “There is Didion in the female protagonist with the fractured consciousness and there is Naipaul in the sharp portrait of a third world where revolution battles privilege, but Apostol performs her own unique alchemy: she fuses poetic language with a thriller story to create a mesmerizing slow-burn of a book.” 

“Rebellion and romance,” the synopsis has it, “set in the Marcos-era Philippines,” where Soledad Soliman “transforms herself from bookish rich girl to communist rebel.” But does she commit herself to the movement just for the man she falls in love with?

Writing for Los Angeles Review of Books, Brian Collins calls the novel brilliant: “… a tour de force tale about late 20th century Manila, but… also a book for our times.” Of the protagonist, “one of the most compelling characters in recent fiction,” Collins notes: “Soledad’s verbal intensity we grasp as that of a bookish only child with a cosmopolitan upbringing. Apostol even allows her to overwrite here and there, to slip into a precious or self-indulgent style, sharpening our image of Soledad as a stunted character.”

Occasionally too poetic might be a quibble from among readers who want their narratives straightforward. But as has been noted, this felicity of prose mode is rationalized by reliance on a 1st-person POV, that of the main character who happens to have a faux-maven character. 

Indeed, this POV can also mesmerize with passages simultaneously taut and lissome, even of scenes that recall Pinoy movie affectations: “I saw the blood dripping from my thighs, thick like wax. I discovered the blood in the bathroom. Before I did anything, I watched to see how far the blood would drip, down from the pubis through the thigh, veering over flesh to run crooked above the knee, thinning and grinning about the kneecap, then in a bright vein narrowing to a hair-width, which trickled down my calf. It didn’t quite reach the ankle.”

A good read is what we’re assured of whenever an Apostol book lands in our hands. Her first two novels, Bibliolepsy (1997, UP Press) and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata (2010, Anvil), won the National Book Award for Fiction.

Another book I received that night in Manhattan was longtime buddy Fidelito C. Cortes’ Everyday Things (2010, UST Publishing House), his long overdue second poetry collection. He couldn’t join us that night, was nursing an everyday flu in Long Island. But his ever-trusty spouse (oh, she’ll hate this) Nerissa Balce, writer-critic and fellow Dumaguete fellow, did the honors for the literary transaction.

Well, the personal dedication made up for Fidelito’s absence, and so I’ll rave about the 40 poems collected here, grouped into four sections: “Housekeeping”; “Santa Claus and Venus at the Mall”; “Homesickness; and “The End.”

In the poem “Housekeeping, Manila,” Section 2 — “Sweeping” — there’s this stanza: “I run to my wife. Is it my wrist action,/ I ask her, or simply a generic failing of the/ masculine wrist? Is this a gender problem?/ Wordlessly, she picks up the broom and with one/ flick of the wrist, the corner is clean.”

Cortes’ diurnal corners of concern are swept of any mawkishness. What is left is quiet elegance in the simplicity of his clean lines. As for the nocturnal angles of repose, here’s what he blows my appreciative ruler/spatula with:

“Moon Blues” — “Dreaming and waking to a song/ forlorn and triste, I could not tell/ where the dream left off and where the blues began// because the dream more real than the waking/ remembered the words full of desire/ full of the memory that is sleep// the lyrics of an old song grown/ suddenly clear and obvious on a moonless night./ Plangencies of the bossa nova and beguine// as love cheeses up all available light/ and cheddars the dark rye of night/ and spreads the moon full.”

Tercets play on the very edges of senti/emo, press the curds of imagistic milk into subtle send-up of the trite and halfway true cliché. This is efficacious poetry — as what Fidelito Cortes has been blessing us with all this time, since his first collection, Waiting for the Exterminator (1989, Kalikasan Press).  

Here he ratchets up the thematic domesticity, even while it still avoids rasping or screeching. As when he essays in full calm and quietude in the title poem:

“… But even the soundest of marriages/ have their rough spots, when we make such deadly/ assaults on civility out of petty slights,/ and words are exchanged, and there are tears in the end./…// But the house has to be cleaned, letters and cards/ to be posted, a check to be put in the bank./ There is cooking and laundry. And we settle/ into our tasks with a method that finally/ approaches the normal. It seems these everyday things/ are stronger than us and more durable,/ as they soothe through the plain and homely/ imperative of what needs doing must be done./ And over and over, if we are to keep house.” 

It’s a good house and a fine home that Cortes’ poetry keeps.

Darryl Delgado has been so underrated among our contemporary fiction writers. I’m glad that she finally came up with her first collection of short stories last year: After the Body Displaces Water (UST Publishing House).

In these 13 pieces (or are there only 11?), we are treated to a gamut of fictive forms — 1st-person, 2nd-person and 3rd-person points of view, omniscient, epistolary, meta, 3-in-1 variations like a choose-your-own Rashomon adventure… 

The writing is consummate: cerebral, controlled, carefully polished without calling attention to its carats, however we sense an objective correlative here, a pound of psychological flesh there, a template of a picture puzzle resolved to its last jigsaw, but barely so, just so.

Form follows function, readability coevals imagination, with characters sliding not jumping out of boxes, and all situations unfolding with supreme sentience.

The afterword by Rosario Cruz Lucero says it: “For each story, however, she doesn’t confine herself to the conventions of one subgenre; instead, she makes two or more of these subgenres fold into each other to create improbably neat works of fiction.”

I like best the story “In Remission,” where a cancer patient of diminishing hopes, a 39-year-old virgin, spends time at a resort hotel and finds her senses awakened, to the smell of oysters, for one, and a drink called Deluge (antidote to her drought), until she is deflowered by a much younger chef.

Sorry: no spoiler alert. Much more ambiguity happens, in her thoughts as well as in her own resolve that determines whether the jigsaw pieces fit. When she consults her doctor, she arrives at epiphany — that of her own awakened strength. 

It’s all splendid storytelling, with shifts in central consciousness jostling gently with environments of both dreamtime and hyper-reality. In “In Remission,” poignance pre-empts pathos, owing to such assiduous craft. The shy lady’s humor is said to be “of dry variety”; we hope her tumor goes the same way.

Ultimately, the prose is exemplary:

“He was fanning the grill, turning huge, stuffed squid over hot coals, and smiling most sweetly at the guests, many of whom were matrons dressed for the ballroom at the hotel’s basement. He looked up briefly and waved greasy tongs at her. She pretended not to see him, as seeing him had the immediate effect of fever and a general weakening on the vague area of her groin which, as it were, seemed as raw and tender as a freshly-scraped, open wound. An ugly gangrene.”

 From greasy tongs to gangrene, all the judicious elements of imagistic detail, motifs, tone, diction, and tropes of purpose hit the G-spot of narrative exultation. Brava!

An international labor rights NGO careerist, Darryl Delgado should also be pressed into service soon as a creative writing workshop panelist. She can certainly teach young writers how to woman up with all the quiet bells and whistles.