1. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Rise of In Lieu of a Field Guide for giving me the opportunity to read Ryu Murakami’s 69. I just received his copy of the book today. I can’t wait to flip the novel’s pages, feel the texture, and inhale the pulp of its paper. I remember reading Ryu’s In the Miso Soup last year, a fast-paced thriller chronicling a male Japanese sex tourism guide’s surrealistic encounters with an American serial killer on a rampage in Tokyo’s Seedy red light district. Gory, but sprinkled with a certain sense of humor. I wonder how 69 would fare.
2. This past month, I was introduced to J.M. Coetzee through his 1983-1999 essays on other writers and topics as diverse as Kafka, Borges, T.S. Eliot, Doris Lessing, Naguib Mahfouz to the 1995 World Rugby Cup in the book Stranger Shores. I’m interested to read Coetzee’s other essays but I’m also wondering which of his novels would be the place to start for his fiction. Any suggestions?
3. I enjoyed Norman Wilwayco’s Gerilya compared to the rather less than positive reception I had of two other contemporary Filipino novels I read earlier this year: Genieve Asenjo’s Lumbay ng Dila I already wrote about previously. Miguel Syjuco’s Ilustrado I will go over briefly in a while. Gerilya, a brief novel of almost two hundred pages, depicts the complexities of the armed struggle waged by the revolutionary movement in the countryside through the alternating and intertwining narratives of two undergraduates-turned-guerrillas of the Communist Party of the Philippines-New People’s Army.
4. The truth is, for all the hype, I didn’t like Syjuco’s Ilustrado that much. There are some inspired moments when the writing engrosses me. I liked the novel’s strategy of presenting some sort of bricolage of letters, blogs, jokes, book extracts of fictional works, among others by and about Crispin Salvador. But the succeeding pages doesn’t seem to live up to the promise presented by the introduction. A sprinkling of interesting fragments every now and then, but it ultimately gave me the impression of an ilustrado’s guilty conscience for the crimes of his class and his inaction over it.
Despite the claims of seeking to “change the country by changing its representations,” the novel ironically ends up replicating the dominant representations of the country! The picture you get is that of a banana republic lorded over by corrupt ruling classes and hopelessly enmeshed in a cycle poverty and violence.
The young are either decadent and drug-addicted hedonists or involve themselves in street protests – EDSA’s 4 and 5 and 6 and so on – that imposes superficial changes but leave the system intact. In contrast to this vision, I find Asenjo’s naive optimism which I wrote about in length months ago to be more progressive.
Is this the only horizon for the country? Perhaps this pessimism is reflective of the need for the legal democratic movement to exert more effort in really popularizing and raising the corruption discourse to the level of a critique of the system itself and collective action for radical social transformation. In this context, I can forsee that the next few years will see a qualitative leap in the commitmments and perspectives taken up by Filipino literary texts. ■
You’re most welcome, Karlo. I’m expecting you’ll enjoy more of Ryu’s quirky brand of humor. As for Coetzee, I’ve read 5 by him and I would say The Master of Petersburg or Boyhood can be great entries to his fiction.
I appreciate your assessments of both Gerilya and Ilustrado. For me, they represent two contrasting responses to the corruptive forces of Philippines society. I also like your optimism in this statement: “I can forsee that the next few years will see a qualitative leap in the commitments and perspectives taken up by Filipino literary texts.” It made me hopeful, too.
Thanks for the suggestion on Coetzee. I’ll be watching out for The Master of Petersburg as Dostoevsky is another of my favorites. I’m actually starting with 69 already. (I always transgress my own self-imposed rules on reading order).
I don’t know. I think I’m actually quite pessimistic… and vulgar too. That vision is hinged on the premise that interesting things are bound to happen in the next decade: cataclysmic and unexpected events that future writers will have to confront.
In the belief that something different is bound to happen: perhaps I am optimistic in that sense.