Reading Brillantes in Diliman

If there’s one thing I admit that’s surprised me in recent memory, it’s the multitude that greeted Neil Gaiman when he visited our shores last year. Until then, it really hadn’t occurred to me that – gasp – Filipinos actually did read. (Ironic, really, and obtuse of me… given that I’m Filipino and read quite a lot.) Gaiman was taken aback – so much so that he would write in correspondence to his sponsor, Fully Booked, that it was the best reception he’d ever received… anywhere. For a brief moment, Manila went gaga for someone whose only claim to being a rock star was wearing a leather jacket. He was a writer.

I know for a fact that for a great number of people going to the Power Plant mall at Rockwell isn’t complete without a trip to the bookstore. This isn’t P.R. — I’m one of those people. And I’m hardly ever alone at any given time in the store. Filipinos read. What a revelation!

The next question is, "What exactly do they read?" Again it’s a surprise that it’s not the usual drivel (titles like the Chicken Soup for the Soul series) but rather stuff like National Geographic’s The Gospel of Judas or classics like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (around the time Capote came out) have all topped the bestseller charts. Even the science fiction (nope, it ain’t fantasy) novel The Prestige by little-known SF author Christopher Priest has come out of obscurity via a Hollywood film adaptation starring Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. Point is, this isn’t the first time a commercial film’s been based on a literary source but up until now I hadn’t realized that there’s a considerable number who’d go out and read the novel after. (Reminds me of a sitcom wherein two characters were discussing the merits of either reading the original book or watching the film version of a story. After hearing all the arguments for reading, the other fellow retorted that one thing better about watching the movie is, "No reading.")

Until recently I read fiction almost exclusively (which is ironic because my father taught me to read on non-fiction fare such as biographies on Napoleon). Early on, both Poe and Dante already held sway over me. Accordingly, as I grew older I discovered other authors, reading science fiction, fantasy and horror by masters such as Bradbury, Bloch, Matheson and Philip K. Dick. By puberty, the "weightier" material kicked in, novels by Camus, Hemingway and Kafka. (Around this time, I also tried reading James Joyce and William S. Burroughs – I only managed to finish Ulysses and Naked Lunch almost a decade later.) But it was only in college, taking a Lit subject, that I came across the author that would change my life. His name was Gregorio C. Brillantes, the story was "The Cries of Children on an April Afternoon in the Year 1957" and he was a Filipino writer.

The language was rich – but not in the way someone like Proust or even Henry James could make you sick, the equivalent of eating too many bon-bons. Brillantes had a way of writing so that the words sang with music that rings only too familiar to anyone who’s been in a jeepney playing an 8-track at maximum level through a tinny speaker, attended Holy Mass wherein even the priest’s sermon is drenched in echo; or lived in a country wherein their president sings off-key in Ilocano to B-movie starlets during pillow talk.

Unlike other Filipino writers whose work I was acquainted with at the time, he set himself apart as a visual storyteller, guiding us through to each image with such assured mastery that it can only be compared to the work of film director Mike de Leon. Much like the filmmaker (or perhaps Carlos Celdran on his popular walking tours in Manila) he’s able to convey a sense of wonder — often frightening — and create epiphanies in settings that I have to admit inspire as much passion in me as Amorsolo’s paintings.

I’ve been hooked on Brillantes ever since.

To tell you the truth, I’ve never been a big fan of "realism." As shown in my list a few paragraphs back, I’ve always been inclined to favor something that deviated from the mundane, embraced the strange and was unafraid to be a bit outrageous. Science fiction with all its bizarre worlds and concepts fit into this category quite nicely. Horror and other fantastic types of literature do, too. But as I’ve grown older, stories needn’t go to Arcturus or dredge up Cthulhu from his slumber to give me that kick. You see, the one thing that I need to get from writers when I read fiction is that they have imagination. It should be a prerequisite but you’d be surprised by how many "classics" – especially from the 20th century, the kinds you find winning all the awards – are just unreadable and dull. Imagination is something that even a hack like James Blish had. (He had much more – as proven by novels such as A Case of Conscience, Black Easter and the Star Trek novelizations – but you get the point.)

Brillantes has imagination – and he never even had to leave Camiling. Nope, UFOs didn’t come down in the plaza or breed pods in its river in his stories. They didn’t have to. The people he grew up and was familiar with were already alien enough.

At the time, none of his books were in print so I dug deep into the cards at the main library at UP and searched for everything that he wrote. The librarian would then retrieve the story from Palanca winner anthologies and, for a small charge, photocopy it for you. This was how I came across my favorite Brillantes story, "Journey to the Edge of the Sea," which, in my humble opinion, is one of the greatest stories ever written in the English language. I’ve never had quite an experience like reading that story for the first time. (To my shock, it only notched third prize that year in the fiction category.)

Aside from his fiction, Brillantes has worked since 1972 for a number of publications including Philippine Free Press, Asia-Philippines Leader, National Midweek and Philippine Graphic. Aside from serving as an editor, he wrote numerous non-fiction pieces – some of which he himself calls "literary reportage." Up until recently, this has largely been out of print.

It was no minor event in literary circles when not less than three volumes of Brillantes’ non-fiction were released, namely Looking for Jose Rizal in Madrid (UP Press), The Cardinal’s Sins, the General’s Cross, the Martyr’s Testimony, and Other Affirmations (Ateneo de Manila University Press), and Chronicles of Interesting Times (Anvil). Showing as much bravura in style but with the same care with words, Brillantes demonstrates that his abilities as a storyteller do not exclusively belong to his imaginary people and locales. Filled with illuminating essays about our local heroes, pop culture and his beloved Camiling (the most startling of which being a single-sentence prose poem), Brillantes even manages to make something as banal as plane flight or – even worse – recent Philippine history gleam with new luster, revealing new angles by which to view even the supposedly most hackneyed of subjects. Using both observation and insight, Brillantes is at par with both Greene and Wolfe as literary journalists, a chronicler who presents his subject more vividly in a couple of pages than entire history books filled with hard facts. I say throw out the Agoncillo and the Zaide and give the kids something that they’ll at least have a chance of enjoying. Perhaps they’ll even learn a thing or two.

As a gesture of appreciation, Gaiman came up with the idea of putting up a writing contest for Filipinos that promoted "Filipino unrealism." Finding myself the chairman of this contest (which would be named The First Philippine Graphic/Fiction Awards) I was given the opportunity to name the prose award after a Filipino writer that best represented our aim.

Guess who?