The Lost Language by Marianne Villanueva

(In which home is still the best place.)

***

Reading Villanueva’s The Lost Language reminds me of the days when my classes in the university had at least two hours interval and I had to sit in the library throughout the entire period to pass the time. It felt good to pick up a small book and finish it. I especially love compilations – short stories, one-act plays, poems about the darkness of Manila and the backwardness of the provinces. Yes, Villanueva brought them all back. And then some.

What I like about the stories was the distinct Filipino feeling about almost everything. It felt as though I flew to America and witnessed another tale of another brave Filipino immigrant in a cruel city. The familiarity made me feel at home but unfortunately gave some stories a cliché mood. And the normality of a dysfunctional Filipino family, as believed by a character, lingers in my thoughts as I flipped the pages and jumped from one story to another.

Yes, jumped. There are some easy reads. But most of the time I find it hard to grasp the way a part of the story leads to another. And some endings were so abrupt that the feeling of finality was lost.

However, though I jumped from one story to another, I should say that when it comes to the characters, I glided – for the characters in The Lost Language share the complexities of the mind of people in a tormenting atmosphere intensified by pressure and loss.

I believe that there should be a good time for reading a certain book. In the case of The Lost Language, I couldn't say that it’s for either a sunny or a rainy day. The bitterness of it would break hearts during the former and make past wounds fresh and deeper in the latter. But if there’s a time when one wishes to see real life and feelings unfold as one searches for or looks back at the silent traces of his or her being Filipino, this book is a must read.

Photo SourceThe Lost Language

Unfinished Reading I: Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen

(In which I realized that the darkness within a family fiction doesn’t really suit me.)

***

Although we were reminded not to judge a book by its cover, I often do. Look. Who wouldn’t love the blackness and the blueness and the drama of an iris? Now, you get the point.

But as soon as you found out that the title suggests bruises and that it’s about an eye that watches and searches and another that watches and hides, you just know you’re in for some depressing psychological read. Which is actually not bad. Until you realize that you’d rather not read at all than be submerged in depression one hot, sunny afternoon.

The first flips of Anna Quindlen’s Black and Blue seemed a promising relationship between my eyes and the paper. Frannie, the nurse who got beat up by her husband sounded real, along with her pains and fears and her attempt to normalize a family that is actually rotten in the core. She put up with the physical abuse and the rape and covered the black-and-blue marks everyday with makeup and lived “normally”. Until she realized she could take no more. Then she sought help from a woman in an agency whose job is to find ways on how a victim of domestic violence could “disappear” in the hopes of living a new life. She brought her son, Robert, with her and lived with a new name, made new friends in a new neighborhood miles away from her husband. But the tragedy that haunted her doesn’t make her any distant from the nightmare. And every day she lived with utmost care and paranoiac in fear of being discovered by the man she once loved but now she chose to run away from.

Yes, and that’s half of the novel. Some run-on sentences and sporadic recollections that drove me crazy. But as I said, it’s not really bad. We all have our preferences. Perhaps it’s just because I’m not into novels about dysfunctional families with plots that run like a Jennifer Lopez movie.

But life goes on. In this case, reading does. Besides, there are more art fictions to read.

Currently reading

The God of Spring by Arabella Edge

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The God of Spring

Zildjian II

(In which we work for survival.)

***

With stabbing bluntness of truth
from honest lips and a heart
so ironically vulnerable,
endear yourself to me.

Surrender thyself in impossibly sweet ways
they will never understand.
In so many sweet ways
they will never understand.
For comprehension is futile,
questions superfluous,
reactions uncalled for;
Let’s just breathe tonight.

For a thousand needle points on red, raw flesh,
let me find my remedy from a sentence.
For a thousand questions and repetitions,
find your assurance in tears and
fears that killed me,
almost.

Let the world breathe.
Let the world die.
Let the world leave
and never wonder why.
For we are refugees – you and I.
So let us flee where none chases and fate is an ally;
where starry nights are eternal

and surrealism, a fact.

(For part first of this verse, click here.)

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Couple in Moonlight