The Lost Diary of Don Juan by Douglas Carlton Abrams

(In which old diaries are still the best.)

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One thing, among others, that is considerably underrated nowadays is privacy. Almost all of us posts not only what we're thinking but also what we're eating, doing, seeing, as well as who we're hating or loving and all the other stuff that used to be private at least half a decade ago when internet access was a luxury and blogs and networking sites were uncommon. At the rise of these groundbreaking technological innovations, almost everybody can see what's in other people's minds, hearts or stomach even if (sometimes) they don't want to. It has indeed become an age of public diaries.
But honestly, if there's something more joyfully intrusive and sneakier in the past than stalking someone on Facebook now, it's peeking into someone else's diary. Now reading someone else's diary in its entirety is another story. It somehow becomes something like reading or watching prohibited media - still taboo, yet without the adrenaline rush and the mystery. Fortunately, though, that's not always the case. Take Abram's first novel for example, in which he offers a traverse in the mind of one of the most notorious (if not the most already) womanizer of all time, Don Juan..
Abandoned in a monastery and raised by Sevillian nuns, Don Juan Tenorio grew up to be the romantic figure that he was known today after a tragic love affair. He rose up to nobility through the help of Marquis de la Mota. He worked as a thief, a spy, and a galeantador, seducer of women. He seduced women after women of various colors, social and marital status. Loved by virgins and wives and widows, he was terribly abhorred by husbands and most specially the Holy Inquisition. Just when he thought that he was only capable of giving women pleasure, he found Doña Ana, the girl he willed to give his heart and fight for, even at the expense of his friendship with the Marquis.
Starting with the editor’s disclaimer regarding the diary’s authenticity and ending with the last entry by Don Juan’s coachman, readers are bound to be intoxicated with the life of this love guru. Told in his eloquent voice and masterful lectures on love and passion, one would perhaps cease seeing Don Juan as an insouciant bed hopper but as a person in need and worthy of love and companionship.

Currently reading:
Tolstoy Lied: A Love Story by Rachel Kadish

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

(In which I was once again baffled by an artist.)

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Usually, when people use a one-word description of artists, they would come up with something like weird, strange or eccentric. Interestingly, when one justifies his eccentricity and weirdness he would retaliate by saying he’s an artist, like what Ogie Alcasid did in his Manila Girl movie.

Nicolas des Innocents, however, has his own brand of ‘artistic’ qualities.

In Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicorn, Nicolas is introduced as a cocky, conceited, handsome and lascivious miniaturist who was commissioned to do a tapestry design for Jean Le Viste. In the course of the story he is able to impregnate two women (whose children he never took responsibility of) through his winning story about the purifying power of the unicorn’s horn. You can, of course, go ahead and use your imagination.

But as an artist, he is gifted. Though people do not want to tell him that. Why, he does that himself! Before one can give out a sigh of admiration for his work, he would blurt out his ideas about how perfect he thinks his work is; and then the admirers would think better than letting their tongue boost his already colossal ego. So what they will tell him are the faults, which of course he won’t take, what with the perfection of his work and skill. Until he met the tapestry weavers.

If there’s one thing quite gripping about the novel, it’s actually not how talented Nicolas is as an artist, or how significant women in the novel are portrayed symbolically in the five tapestries narrating the seduction of the unicorn. It’s the marvelous transformation of one art to another emphasized by how readers can peep through every character’s mind to see how paint connects to thread. What remains after closing the book is definitely not whether Nicolas succeeds in seducing Jean Le Viste’s beautiful daughter Claude or if the unicorn tapestries made Nicolas and/or the de la Chapelle weavers famous, but the beautiful end product of the timeless virtue of hard work in achieving one’s seul desir. One desire.

Currently reading

The Lost Diary of Don Juan by Douglas Carlton Abrams

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The Lady and the Unicorn

Don Juan

The Reading Group by Elizabeth Noble

(In which I’m starting to really like British writing.)

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If there’s one thing similar among Alan Benett, Michel Faber and Elizabeth Noble apart from being British, it’s the uplifting humor in their writing. it comes when you least expect it, thus catching you off guard. But then the good storytelling grasps you again until you bump into another humorous remark. Before you know it, you’ve finished the novel, smiling and ruminating and shaking your head in disbelief.

The latest addition to my ever-growing pile is that of Elizabeth Noble’s – The Reading Group. I picked it up believing it would be a great help in my ambitious idea of starting a book club in the university I am currently teaching in, only to be baffled by how much I underestimated the novel’s capability. What seems to be a mere reading group turned out to be a complicated mix of women living complicated lives made colorful by the books they read. The team is made up of Harriet, a woman who believes that there must be more in life that her consistently loving husband; her best friend Nicole, who thinks there’s nothing more valuable than her consistently philandering husband; Polly, a woman torn between her love for her new boyfriend and her twenty-year-old pregnant daughter; Susan, a ridiculously happily married woman tormented by her mother’s disease; and Clare, a quiet yet clever woman who lives the unfortunately ironic life as an infertile midwife. The women, different as they are in age, belief and size, turn out to be the greatest allies each of them needs. Hesitation fills them at first. But just like The Avengers, they realize they are together in a reading group to serve a common purpose – to find solace in their tumultuous lives in the arms of people who understand.

Told in a lively, omniscient voice, The Reading Group takes readers into the labyrinth of women’s heart and mind. And in the end of the maze, if one doesn’t find a pot of gold, then at least there’s the enlightening trio of feminine strength, friendship and literature.



Currently reading

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chavalier




Photo source:

The Reading Group
The Lady and the Unicorn