thetravelingminstrel

Charlson Ong: A Song of War

Stunning. Cinematic. Unforgettable.

Banyaga: A Song of War weaves melodies, threads, saturated shades of scarlet, unattainable indigo, and moonlight yellow into the rich literary tapestry of our nation, and gives prominence to an underwritten perspective of Philippine history and literature — that of the Tsinoys, the Chinese Filipino.

The vivid imagery (beginning with Chinese boys caught in a brawl that results in a sworn brotherhood, on a ship heading for Manila) that remains consistent up to its plaintive ending in Manila Bay almost a century later; the fleshed-out personalities and exuberance of the characters; and the nonlinear narrative, brilliantly interlaced throughout the American occupation until the post-Martial Law era, tempts the mind’s eye to read this with a Wong Kar-Wai filter. With the acculturation of Chinese and Filipino traditions, and the subtle exposé on the workings of the government, economy, and political unrest as a backdrop, all of these lend to it a fullness of texture and quality that I have yet to encounter in any other Filipino novel published in the 2000s.

Banyaga, which means “foreigner” in our language, follows the lives of Ah Puy, Ah Sun, Ah Beng, and Ah Tin who hoped to escape poverty and political turmoil in China. Their dreams for better lives are soon trumped when they are rejected by relatives and family upon their arrival in Manila. As they are forced to fend for themselves and survive in a strange land that would become their only home, they will come to be known as Hilario Ong, Samuel Lee Basa, Antonio Limpoco y Palmero, and Fernando de Lolariaga. The different surnames suggest that the trajectory of their lives takes different turns, but an invisible thread would always bind the lives of the four sworn brothers and their families to each other and the course of Philippine history.

This novel has indelible scenes that will have you gasping in shock, push you on the edge of your seat, and break your heart repeatedly throughout the span of three hundred and seventy-three pages, but most of all, it will lead you to ponder on nationhood and leave you in awe of the heights that our nation’s literature has achieved.

Ismail Kadare: A Dictator Calls

When the International Booker Prize longlist was announced this year, I was thrilled to see the name of its inaugural winner with another nomination. A copy of A Dictator Calls was immediately secured.

Having first encountered Ismail Kadare through Palace of Dreams, a book that warns against authorities who take away even the freedom of dreams, it was enough to make me want to read more.

This was eventually followed by The Three-Arched Bridge, which contrasts Ivo Andrić’s rich and lengthier The Bridge on the Drina by having the texture of a fable, making it easier to read despite the dark subject matter that this reader understood as a chilling metaphor for the new worlds and ideals founded on blood and, perhaps, a disturbing reminder of what is often sacrificed in the name of progress.

This resulted in a back-to-back reading of The Siege wherein I felt amazed to have been held in thrall by the intricacies of fifteenth century military strategies. The “necessary” presence of architects, engineers, poets, chroniclers, astrologers, and the harem on the battlefield added to the madness of war. The Kadare usually straightforward with prose was suddenly generous with details, and delightfully ridiculed war and testosterone, bringing to mind a line from Svetlana Alexievich who wrote, “War smells of men.” The Siege also makes us realize that even though warfare might have evolved greatly since then, man hasn’t. But what makes The Siege my favorite among the Kadare books that I’ve read is the twist of creativity in which the narrative is focused on the besiegers: With this brilliant move we are made privy to the thoughts and intents of those who intend to conquer or wipe out an entire people — “We could take their language,” or their religion: “You can’t call a country conquered until you have conquered its heaven… everything that has to do with the soul.” Trust Kadare to embed a powerful message in an easily overlooked passage, a lesson in what a people must guard and defend — everything that has to do with the soul.

These stories continue to be remarkably resonant. The allegories of tyrannies and parables about the threats of imperialism are redolent of current events, and I believe that even though his novels might need new translations, it also needs new readers.

But please allow me to be blunt: A Dictator Calls is not the best place to start if you’re new to his work.

For readers who would like to geek about a specific moment in Russian/Soviet literature that look into its literary figures and their associations, it can be an entertaining book. But for this fan’s expectations, and the looming promise of examining the relationship between writers and tyranny, it fulfills little and leaves this reader feeling that the book could have been so much more, especially from a writer of such magnitude as Kadare.

Paolo Maurensig: Theory of Shadows

Is it the fate for all chess novels to be dark?

I’m almost certain that one would not arrive at this book unless they have first been to Zweig’s Chess Story (a.k.a The Royal Game) or Nabokov’s The Defense (a.k.a The Luzhin Defence), or Maurensig’s very own The Lüneburg Variation — and therefore conscious about the sort of darkness to which I refer.

While Nabokov’s Luzhin is based on the life (and death) of German chess master Curt von Bardeleben, the chess game in Zweig’s story is said to be patterned after a real game between Alekhine vs. Bogoljubow. Theory of Shadows turns the spotlight on the last days of the very same Alexander Alekhine, World Chess Champion, whose reputation was tainted by accusations of Nazi collaboration, and whose death remains a subject of contention.

The setting is 1946, just as the Nuremberg trials have begun in Germany, and Alekhine is preparing for a comeback in chess at idyllic Estoril, Portugal.

At his seaside hotel, Alekhine befriends another guest, a Jewish violinist, and their interesting conversations about music and chess lure me into the narrative. Alekhine exploits this friendship to console himself that he is not racist while he uses his obsession with chess as self-justification for his past actions. But when new hotel guests who recognize the grandmaster appear on the scene and question him about his past, his delusions disintegrate and his guilt becomes more apparent. Then comes the reckoning.

One way or another, there is always retribution when cooperating with evil. The reader can only conclude that Alekhine’s presence in Estoril was simply an endgame played by an unknown hand that very well could have been the Soviets, maybe even the Germans, or Fate, or simply Justice.

“The real danger lies in not recognizing evil once it is already within us.”

This was Alekhine’s mistake. And it is the mistake of many who often shake hands with evil for personal gain.

Benjamin Labatut: The MANIAC

Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss appeared in my mind’s eye when I encountered the lines about Strauss being the person John von Neumann was speaking to on the telephone when the latter collapsed and was subsequently diagnosed with cancer; the person by von Neumann’s bedside as he lay dying; and the person who delivered von Neumann’s eulogy at the Princeton Cemetery.

It was Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer that I imagined when he was quoted as saying, “With the creation of the atom bomb physicists have known sin, and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose”; and when he was mentioned opposing the building of the hydrogen bomb through the MANIAC (Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer) — The MANIAC, whose chief architect was von Neumann.

The movie, Oppenheimer, and its characters are still fresh in our minds. But who is John von Neumann? And why doesn’t he figure in the film when these people were his contemporaries and colleagues, and when he played such a huge role in the Manhattan Project, aside from being credited for calculating the optimal height for the detonation of the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The second question can be answered by various speculations. Benjamin Labatut answers the first: He was the smartest human being of the 20th century.

“The cleverest man in the world… a genius, a very great genius,” according to Albert Einstein. The back cover sums up von Neumann as, “…the individual who birthed the modern computer, laid down the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, written the equations for the implosion of the atomic bomb, fathered the Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, heralded the arrival of digital life, self-reproducing machines, artificial intelligence, and the technological singularity…”

Labatut, rockstar that he is, goes beyond what we can find in Wikipedia; simplifies alien quantum talk into plain language; constructs a complex and eerie portrait of a flawed superhuman through the different lenses of von Neumann’s peers, rivals, friends, and family; and charts the seemingly unstoppable advancement of AI.

The book highlights the irony of what comes hand in hand with technological progress, how the rise of the computer was tied to and hastened by the nuclear arms race: “Just think about this for a second: the most creative and the most destructive of human inventions arose at exactly the same time. So much of the high-tech world we live in today, with its conquest of space and extraordinary advances in biology and medicine, were spurred on by one man’s monomania and the need to develop electronic computers to calculate whether an H-bomb could be built or not.”

In the first chapter we find an account of Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest waiting for the train and heading to his suicide, and it makes for a strong allegory for the shared fate of humanity and technology: “…even though he could not hear it, could not feel its faint rumbling in the distance, he still knew that it would come, there was no stopping it, in fact it had just arrived, he could see it rolling slowly into the platform, smoke billowing all around him as the whistle shrieked, but even then he still had time to turn back…and walk away, he still had time, and yet he stood, machinelike, propelled by a force he neither recognized nor understood, and took five steps with his legs as stiff as an automaton’s, to board the wagon and take his place among the rest.”

By reading this book, one can see why it was important for Labatut to write it: The portrait of John von Neumann is the portrait for, and of, our age.

Who needs science fiction when reality is this chilling?

Barbara Comyns: The Juniper Tree

Take care, dear Bella. Happiness is a very fragile thing…

Barbara Comyns is such a skillful writer who can string you along with hope despite a sense of foreboding right from the beginning. It is the same thing that oddly lures you deeper into the story until the previously unknown but anticipated event suddenly confronts and startles you.

It is a book too dark for a Sunday read, but perhaps it was written to reveal the madness that could ensue when women go against their intuition and trade their freedom for something else.

Balsam Karam: The Singularity

“I come from a tradition of loss.”

Kurdish authors — whether their Kurdish-ness belongs to the Iranian, Iraqi, Turkish, or Syrian side — all come from the same amorphous tradition of storytelling, and they have an artful way of wrapping their own originality around this. But they also come from another kind of tradition; that of loss.

Balsam Karam describes herself as, “a Kurdish writing in Swedish.” That is exactly why, even without checking what this novel is about, I immediately purchased a copy. There is a scarcity of Kurdish voices in literature, and this scarceness urges me to listen to each one.

Now I have found that this book is about mothers losing children; and children losing mothers; motherlands being uprooted of her children; and children being separated from their motherlands; written by a woman who is in the process of retrieving her voice when she thought she had lost it along with her firstborn; and all these meld into each other in a mosaic of poetry and prose.

Yes, it is fragmented and it is painful. That’s what loss feels like.

Linda Ty-Casper: The Three-Cornered Sun

“The chief glory of every people arises from its authors.”

Debatable to some, for sure. But I am inclined to agree with Samuel Johnson, and with Susan Sontag. Especially after having read The Three-Cornered Sun.

Read the review at exlibrisphilippines.com.

Nawal el Saadawi: Two Women in One

While I have long discovered that I prefer the nonfiction writer in Nawal, her fiction remains to be in a class by itself. (That’s why I still continue collecting what I can of her books, fiction and nonfiction, especially now that I’ve discovered these excellent editions — in terms of publication quality and translation — from Saqi Books.)

Two Women in One is not straightforward storytelling. There’s a tinge of Clarice in the free indirect prose. Unsettling, like any piece by Nawal; claustrophobic, and therefore, effective.

It’s not a good place to start if one is new to Nawal. The angst of a young woman, wanting to be an artist but who’s forced into medical school, is potent here.

Conformity becomes suffocating to her, “Everything had the same color and shape to her. All bodies were similar, and all gestures and voices. She found herself running aimlessly… fleeing the deadly sameness within and without…” When she realizes that none of her life is her doing or her own choice, she unleashes a rebellious other woman in her. “Freedom is dangerous, but life without it is no life at all.”

But what I found most powerful in this work is the underlying message that unless Egypt is free, she cannot be free. “Egypt was not free. The chains were still there.” Because when all is said and done, how a nation treats their women, is always a measure of that nation. A woman’s personal freedom is often symbiotic and synonymous with national freedom.

My Pen is the Wing of a Bird: New Fiction by Afghan Women

This book came into my possession on International Women’s Day. That day I was asked to speak at an event in celebration of Woman; and as one who never goes out without a book (in case of emergency), I slipped this in my bag on the way out. I was early at the venue so I took this out and flipped the title page. It read:

“My pen is the wing of a bird; it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think, those dreams we are not allowed to dream.”

Batool Haidari, Untold Author, International Women’s Day 2021

The line was written on exactly the same day three years earlier. That’s when I knew I brought the right book with me.

The first open call inviting Afghan women to submit short fiction came in 2019. The creation of this anthology and the translation of the pieces from Afghanistan’s two principal languages, Dari and Pashto, pressed on through more than just power outages and internet service interruptions, but also a global pandemic lockdown and the Taliban takeover in 2021. The book that now sits on my shelf is a triumph.

As anyone might have guessed, there is little happiness here. But it makes us see that there is humanity, kindness, and so much more to Afghanistan’s stories than just war. As in any short story collection, some stories have more literary merit than others, but every single one deserves our attention if we wish to educate ourselves and see a more thorough picture of Afghanistan and the world we live in — especially when their humanitarian crisis continues even as the world’s attention is no longer on them.

“My pen is the wing of a bird; it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think, those dreams we are not allowed to dream.”

This line made me realize the wide gulf between literature by women from places of conflict and the first world. In literature from the first world, this would refer to careless and obsessive romantic affairs, and the women who write about these things are lauded for their rawness and honesty. In literature from marginalized communities, the thoughts they are not allowed to think and the dreams they are not allowed to dream are education, work, the freedom to do the right thing, and the freedom to live. A dose of the latter is always a healthy reality check on the disparity present even within women’s literature.

Susan Sontag: At the Same Time

Reading on Women’s Month is something I look forward to each year. There’s simply nothing like communing with some of the fiercest minds in literature for an entire month!

I’m glad to have kicked off with Hurricane Clarice and Hanne Ørstavik, but this month’s reading goals are not too unrealistic: One Sontag essay a day (although I will definitely squeeze in what I can). I cannot fully express how much her words feed me so profoundly.

“…literature was a criticism of one’s own reality, in the light of a better standard.” — From The World As India

“Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours. Who would we be if we could not sympathize with those who are not us or ours? Who would we be if we could not forget ourselves, at least some of the time? Who would we be if we could not learn? Become something other than we are?” — From Literature is Freedom

“To have access to literature, world literature, was to escape the prison of national vanity, of philistinism, of compulsory provincialism… Literature was the passport to enter a larger life; that is, the zone of freedom. Literature was freedom. Especially in a time which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.” — From Literature is Freedom

“And one of the resources we have for helping us to make sense of our lives, and make choices, and propose and accept standards for ourselves, is our experiences of singular authoritative voices, not our own, which make up that great body of work that educates the heart and the feelings and teaches us to be in the world, that embodies and defends the glories of language: namely, literature.” — From At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning

“The writer’s first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth… and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification… the job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.” — From The Conscience of Words

“A writer is first of all a reader.” — From The World As India

“The capacity to be overwhelmed by the beautiful is astonishingly sturdy and survives amidst the harshest distractions.” — From An Argument About Beauty