Tag: Art

Nancy Mitford: The Sun King

In some editions, the full title is The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles. This is more apt because the book is not an exhaustive portrait of Louis XIV but a well-researched record of the workings of the French Court in Versailles, its intrigues and its scandals, and the intimate lives of its prominent figures.

It is rather detailed in a sense, and to a fault, that if not for Nancy Mitford’s entertaining wit, it would have bored me to read about the rivalries of the mistresses and the parts that read like royal gossip.

But I would still recommend reading this book on a weekend when one would prefer something that does not weigh on the emotions. Of course, a better recommendation would be to bring this book on a trip to Versailles. At a hundred and sixty nine pages, it is a none too heavy starting point for one interested in reading about the birth of the ostentation that led to the Revolution two kings and less than a century later; and yet another reminder of how quickly and drastically the tides of history turn.

Natalia Ginzburg

The City and the House (March 2023)

“The telephone isn’t made for saying important things that need time and space.”

Happiness, as Such (August 2024)

The merit of Natalia Ginzburg’s epistolary novels — whether they are wholly or partially comprised of an exchange of letters between characters — is their being time capsules of an age when corresponding through letters was the principal means of remote communication. It was in letters that banalities could be reported as much as consequential information, and people were allowed space to be frank. Letters tracked the growth, or stagnation, of their writers. Self-expression flowed freely where individual and shared stories unfolded. Ginzburg seems to have maximized on the medium and preserved it, foreknowing a time, our time, when letter writing would be at the point of near extinction.

“Happiness… It is like water; one only realizes it when it has run away.”

Voices in the Evening (January 2024)

Of sad loves and sad lives. For me to truly appreciate Ginzburg’s work and write something of worth about it is, perhaps, to regard it as a whole after I’ve read everything she’s ever written.

For now, this book only evokes a specific memory:

He and I had just listened to the whiskey-soaked voice of Tom Waits. We said we did not want to end up like the people sung by the raspy voice.

But we can’t really predict life, we agreed. 

We can only try, I said.

We did not try hard enough.

Jon Fosse: Trilogy

The fate of the fiddler is fatal… always giving yourself to others… always trying to make others whole…

…and if he was asked where it (music) came from, he answered that it probably came from grief, grieving over something, or just grief, and in the music grief could lighten and become soaring and the soaring could become happiness and joy, so therefore music was needed, therefore he had to play… 

It was the violin on the cover that decided my first Jon Fosse. I wouldn’t have known where to start, and I have been eager to start ever since he received the Nobel for prose which “gives voice to the unsayable”.

And so it was the violin, or rather the fiddle. And because of the fiddle, I sit here a day after reading the last line. A day, because for an entire day I could not write anything about it. I could only feel and think of it and nurse this prolonged pinch in my heart. And maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be, and I should drop my attempt to say something clever about it. 

Because I sit here and feel drenched by the weight of simplicity. Because in his words there is a childlike simplicity that humbles what we think we know about expressing life and about storytelling. Because Jon Fosse is a poet, and his poetry and prose bleed into each other, leaving no borders between them.

New Year, New Eyes

New year, new eyes: This has become an annual theme for my first book of the year, and it has usually involved non-fiction that prod me to look at history, music, literature, life, or the world with a set of new eyes.

This year, I was not able to plan my first book. My younger brother was home for the holidays and reading was not part of the itinerary. We spent most of our time adventuring in the kitchen and binge watching shows that I would normally forgo for reading if left to my own devices.

And it was on a brief solitude after lunchtime when I realized that it was already 2024 and I was without a reading plan.

Then these two books that haven’t yet made their way into my shelf caught my eye, presents from a dear friend who recently traveled to Japan. They came with a note that said, “Our hotel in Kyoto had a bookstore right across it…”

I flipped through There Was a Knock by Shinichi Hoshi because the author is not as widely known here in the Philippines as Natsume Sōseki. The next thing I knew, I was at the last page wanting more!

The few times I felt this entertained by a writer’s cleverness it was with the likes of Queaneau’s Exercises in Style and Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler! But rather than being variations on a theme, each of Hoshi’s fifteen stories are unpredictable and different, and they only have one thing in common — the first line: There was a knock. Needless to say it’s a literary gem!

Botchan by Natsume Sōseki, on the other hand, took me more than halfway to warm up to the main character whom I found rather judgmental and cynical. It was Sōseki’s humorous and engaging writing that kept me going, but only to make me understand in the end that this is ultimately a book about human nature.

At first glance, I wouldn’t have considered any of these two as candidates for my annual first book of the year theme, but here we are and I do not regret it!

Perhaps that’s what having new eyes is all about, too!

Happy New Year and Happy New Eyes, dear fellow readers!

Claudia Piñeiro: A Little Luck

The phrase “a little luck” appears nine times in A Little Luck, just as “Elena knows” appears nineteen times in Elena Knows.

Does it matter? Not really. Maybe noticing those details says more of me as a reader than Claudia Piñeiro as a writer. One thing is certain; she does not repeat herself because she is running out of ways to say things. She is consistently unpredictable. 

Elena Knows, which I read much earlier, is exceptionally written and translated. The choice to highlight a specific incapacitating disease that isn’t limited to women — to effectively confront every reader with what it feels like to lose bodily autonomy — is, I believe, the most impressive allegory that should be uncovered from under the many brilliant qualities of the novel. There are other apt adjectives for Elena Knows, but beautiful is not one of them.

But for the soulful strains of Piazzolla that wove through A Little Luck’s narrative; for how a woman damaged found the first steps to healing through literature; for how I thought it would all be about pain only to discover that it was principally about happiness; and for the sheer deftness of Piñeiro’s writing — this one is beautiful.

Just as unputdownable, just as suspenseful, just as affecting… and this time, beautiful. 

Cheon Myeong-Kwan: Whale

This book does not say anything about Egon Schiele. But it very well could have been written by him, had he been a novelist instead of a painter.

An unexpected turn inside the Belvedere Museum in Vienna once brought me face to face with enormous paintings by Schiele. When you go to a place for Klimt and be confronted by Schiele, it is a staggering experience you will not easily forget.

Haunting eyes, naked and exaggerated anatomies, comical expressions, grotesque scenes, and dark humor — whether you like it or not, you cannot look away. Even if you eventually manage to, you will be forced to take another look, and another.

Because by some bizarre and compelling artistry, the artist wraps you around a strangely proportioned finger, the way Cheon Myeong-Kwan does in this whale of a tale.

So, do not let the cover design of the Archipelago Books edition with its happy colors fool you. Or maybe, let it fool you; so that it startles you, the way some skillful art and literature should. Maybe take that turn and be confronted by something you normally would not seek out.

Oftentimes, the art that we find grotesque are missives from a mind sensitive to how the world truly operates. For isn’t this book a critique on justice, economic, and social systems; and even on American influence through Hollywood? And aren’t these political caricatures in the guise of troubling characters and a metafictional storyline?

I would think twice before criticizing this book for what it seems on the surface, lest I become akin to that judge in 1912 who set fire to one of Schiele’s drawings at a trial wherein Schiele was accused of indecency.

“Reader, you will believe what you want to believe. That’s all there is to it.”

Prying the lid of the Pandora’s Box that is Chinese Literature

I call it my Fertile Crescent and Silk Route Reading Project and yet there is a glaring dearth of Chinese writers in my literary diet. Maybe because I know that Chinese literature is a sort of Pandora’s box disguised as an ornate lacquer case. One that would release a curse upon the reader. The curse of wanting to read and acquire more.

Unready for another full-blown obsession, this is me prying the lid of that box ever so gently.

Dai Sijie’s Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstrees is closer to Chinese fast food and so much easier and more pleasant to swallow than Ma Jian’s Stick Out Your Tongue; and I can only be glad that I read these two in succession so they could balance each other out. 

Stick Out Your Tongue is the slimmer volume and yet its morbid stories of sky burials, incest, and disturbing Buddhist initiation rites juxtaposed with Tibet’s harsh landscape shakes one to the core. I cannot even think of recommending this book. But it is the afterword that I find especially striking as it draws attention to the destruction that the Chinese government has wrought in Tibet, or the fact that over a million Tibetans have died due to political persecution or famine — yet another case of a people denied control of their lands and destinies by a powerful bully.

Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress, on the other hand, offers more heartwarming and comic imagery as two bourgeois teenage boys navigate their “re-education” in the countryside during China’s Cultural Revolution. They were among the millions of China’s youth who were sent to the rural areas to be re-educated by peasants from the mid-60s to the mid-70s. Their lives take a turn when they meet the little Chinese seamstress, but these lives are truly altered when they unexpectedly encounter French literature at a time when “ignorance is in fashion”. It may not be classified as a literary masterpiece but it is a celebration of the transformative power of literature; and I can’t blame you if this book made you scour bookshops and the internet for a definitive English translation of Romain Rolland’s Jean-Christophe. That’s what it made me do.

Adania Shibli: We Are All Equally Far from Love & Touch

Adania Shibli is the queen of stark but poignant and powerful prose. I’d feel pretentious if I tried to say more than necessary.

Having read Minor Detail already, I downloaded these books in response to her unjustly cancelled award ceremony at the Frankfurt Book Fair that was supposed to take place on October 20, 2023. Shibli’s first two works are described as non-political. I disagree. But maybe they are, if one compares them to Minor Detail, her most famous work, which exposes the rape and murder of a Palestinian girl by Israeli soldiers.

In these two books there is no talk of occupation or governments, most characters do not have names, locations are vague, they recount ordinary lives; but I don’t think it takes a genius to notice that the dismal lives depicted in these earlier works are consequences of systemic trauma and oppression.

For books such as these, it is not the reader’s duty to offer literary analysis, or to say whether they liked it or not. It is the reader’s duty to empathize. Because today, even empathy is hard to come by.

Ian Rosales Casocot: Heartbreak & Magic

A writer who merely sits behind his desk or peers at his city through a tinted car window could not have written this.

The person who has written these stories is well-acquainted with the nooks and crannies of Dumaguete (or “Dumaguet” until it becomes “Dumaguete” again in page sixty), he has sought refuge under its acacia trees, he has gone to the market for puto maya and native cocoa, has frequented the chicken inasal places, he has walked its streets, he is burdened by its secrets, he is intimate with its ghosts and the living, and knows his city like a lover knows his beloved’s face.

Wasn’t this supposed to be a collection of fantasy and science fiction? Doesn’t Neil Gaiman’s blurb on the cover further suggest this? 

Yes, it is; and yes, it does. But I recognize in this book what I recognize in favorite writers like Khoury, Pamuk, and Mahfouz. Their works are celebrations of their cities. The love affair they have with their cities seep into their stories regardless of genre. And yes, it is a book of heartbreak and magic, horror and fantasy, but look deeper and see that it is a celebration of Dumaguete — it’s landscapes, seascapes, its food, and the loves lost and found on its soil.

Beirut has Elias Khoury, Cairo has Naguib Mahfouz, Istanbul has Orhan Pamuk, Dumaguete has Ian Casocot.

Someone give this guy multiple awards.

Oh, wait…

Jorge Luis Borges: The Book of Imaginary Beings

Mr. Borges acknowledged in the preface that a book of this kind is unavoidably incomplete, but I can’t help fantasize about how he would have enjoyed adding Filipino lore to this updated menagerie of a hundred and twenty had our creatures traveled to South America and entered the perimeters of his consciousness. 

An earlier edition invited readers to send names, descriptions, and conspicuous traits of their local monsters. I would have nominated the Tikbalang, the Aswang, the Manananggal, the Sigbin, and one Filipino president or two. 

Although the latter species probably wouldn’t have qualified owing to being non-fictional.