Wilfrido D. Nolledo: But for the Lovers

Before Salman Rushdie there was Wilfrido Nolledo. We find the same clever wordplay, but Nolledo reigns supreme in five languages and a couple of Filipino dialects or more, inclusive of Italian musical terms and Tagalog (they did not call this a feat of language for nothing); there’s that humor that catches by surprise when misery is expected; political caricatures and blaspheming characters that provoke fatwas from the high priests of governments; and those vulgarities that examine moral codes as though asking whether we’d also find war and injustice obscene.

Thanks to countless movies, documentaries, and novels, my generation can conjure mental images of what Paris and other European cities looked like in the final days of WWII, but only few can picture the desolation and the confusion of Manila when it was the bomb-ridden chessboard of the imperial powers. Nolledo encapsulates it for us. But one must not expect a literary Amorsolo, because here is a postmodern Hieronymus Bosch.

“And won’t we be doing the reader an injustice by presuming he can’t digest such stuff?” Nolledo asks in response to a suggestion to cut the manuscript to keep readers interested. And so, signifying that it was written not to sell but for art, he gives it to us, gives it to us hard.

It is not going to be everyone’s cup of barako. It is an explosive halo-halo that is difficult to swallow at times. A revolution on one’s literary tastebuds. Before Rushdie there was Nolledo, but I am only discovering this now. It’s time we did.

And yes, I read this for Valentine’s. Haha!