Bedridden, I took a rest from all writing the other week. Last week was for catching up on the many things I left behind as I took to bed. Last Wednesday, for instance, we had the book launch of the college’s literary portfolio Busay during the college’s Buwan ng Wika celebration.
This post is a break from that illness-induced silence. But even without the extended companionship with sheets and pillows, this virtual space has seen a dearth of updates lately. My apologies, but it simply can’t be helped. Perhaps I can promise to post at least once a week for regularity.
Anyhow, going back to my sickness, the headaches that accompanied the fever hindered pleasurable reading. That did not stop me from going ahead with the hastened destruction of my brain cells and the further deterioration of my eyeballs.
1. The books I devoured, like Ryu Murakami’s 69, didn’t really require much heavy thinking anyway. Reading it, despite the eyestrain from reading in bed, is something like eating expensive chocolates. You don’t have to gnaw on it like with chewing gum.
So far, I always like most of the fiction I’ve read that assumes the point of view of a child or as in the case of 69, that of a narrator recounting his younger years. Either way, you have an adult author reconstructing how a child might view things, his innocence or mischievousness, on the page.
This way, the author has more space to interrogate realities that jaded adults are loathe to do otherwise. Children, not yet having been fully initiated to society’s painful truths, still have a certain innocence that goes against cynicism and unquestioning acceptance of social norms.
Ryu Murakami, like in his other works, is quite consistent with his tongue-in-cheek humor. It’s an amusing account of teenage life in a provincial Japanese town in the late 60s.
Is this the child speaking (could he have thought of this as a younger man) or is this the old man looking back at his childhood inserting this remark?
In Kyushu, like everywhere else, high school newspaper clubs tend to be dens of rebellion, and in our school no club was allowed to align itself with any other. The teachers’ greatest fear was of the students getting organized. Even if members of the newspaper club wanted to do something as harmless as carrying out a survey or collecting information, we had to clear it with the faculty adviser first. Unofficial gatherings were absolutely forbidden. This system was endorsed by the student council. The school laid down the law and used the yes-men in the student council to make it look as if we had made the rules ourselves. It might as well have been a prison. A colony under military rule. It was sickening. (35)
Great observation. The same thing continues to happen in several schools and universities all over the Philippines today.
2. Done in a day. In between my frequent sleep, that’s how and when I read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Heart of a Dog. This novella is one for laughs, much like 69. However, it has a more obvious satirical bent and it also needs more heavy thinking.
For one, the setting being far more removed from present-day neocolonial Philippines means more imagining than Murakami’s western pop culture infused text: Moscow during the New Economic Policy days of the old Soviet regime in the early 1920s.
Bulgakov’s short novel, in short, is a far more estranging experience.
The Heart of a Dog obviously pokes fun at the deficiencies of the young socialist state, particularly the sometimes unchecked rise of abusive individuals of a lumpenic social background in bureaucratic positions as personified in the figure of the sick dog that, after given the heart of a dead criminal in a freak experiment, becomes human.
It also criticizes the unremoulded petty bourgeois intellectuals, like the doctor who did the operation, who are still used to the luxurious lifestyles even as they are thrown into the maelstrom of a grassroots revolutionary process of wealth redistribution.
3. In lieu of a conclusion, I would like to end this brief post by giving my thanks to Murakami and Bulgakov – and more importantly, my beloved’s one afternoon visit – for breaking the monotony of my bedridden days. ■
Nothing like books to humor the sick.