Literature – Page 3 – The Book-Butterfly

May Books and Friends

On the Calculation of Volume I, Solvej Balle

The perfect day to read this would be on a rainy autumnal day. November 18, to be exact. I read it on a sweltering first of May. But I love how it drew me in calmly and made the temperature bearable. To weave reflective prose with only a tinge of disquieting tension is Solvej Balle’s gift. It is a book for when we read not for the plot but for the language.

Something tells me that this is more than just a story about a specific day that recurs 366 times in the novel but rather a meditation on time and the distance it creates between our relationships with others and with our present and former selves.

If after tonight I’ll wake up to another first of May, I’d still read this… or perhaps, volume two.

There’s No Turning Back, Alba de Céspedes

“Love, like art. It’s there or it’s not.”

Alba is cruel. She tells the truth. This book left the dock before I was able to fully say goodbye. I would have wanted to be with some characters a little bit longer to find out how their lives would continue to unfold. But Alba, after drawing you intimately into both the communal and the separate lives of each girl, shakes off attempts at clinginess and writes with a knife: That is how life is, she seems to say. It moves. It keeps going. And there is no turning back.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong

“It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.”

There are times when you don’t know why you put off purchasing a particular book despite it being recommended by a friend, despite seeing a lot of people post about it, despite seeing it in almost every bookstore. You’ll only know the answer when, years later, you receive a copy as pasalubong from the Book Street in Ho Chi Minh. Books always hold an added value when falling into your hands this way.

But oh, how this book breaks your heart in different ways! Maybe because of how love is shown in its many degrees along with the pain that comes with each kind of love.

“I’m broken in two… In two, it was the only thought I could keep, sitting in my seat, how losing a person could make more of us, the living, makes us two… Into — yes, that’s more like it. Now I’m broken into.”

Something tells me, however, that this is not peak Ocean Vuong yet, that the magnum opus is yet to come: Could it be The Emperor of Gladness? We’ll soon find out.

Concepcion, Albert Samaha

“History ripples into perpetuity. Decisions, actions, mistakes, and triumphs of one day shape the days that follow, setting irreversible paths into the future…”

In Concepcion, Philippine history ceases to be a structured chronology but a fluid tale that merges with the timeline of world history, personal history, and geopolitics. Read full entry here.

Erik Satie Three Piece Suite, Ian Penman

Gymnopedies… Gnossienes… “If you only know these few exquisite morsels, you only know a tiny fraction of Satie…” This book showed me how little I knew of Satie and how I underestimated the role that this composer played in the trajectory of art and music history.

“Dip a toe into the Satie rock pool and you soon discover a cove, a coastline, an entire horizon.” Ian Penman dips his toes, and luckily, takes willing readers along for the ride! Written in an ingenious form in three parts, I am tempted to assert that there couldn’t be a more fitting way of writing about one such as Satie.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

Because how can we make the most of a retelling if we don’t know, or have forgotten, what was originally told in the first place? Yes, you guessed right. This reader is prepping for Percival Everett’s James!

How I managed to find time to read in May was a miracle. What a hurricane, the past few weeks! It threw all sorts of things at me, but it threw some of the best things my way, too: My very own grand piano, the younger brother’s short but sweet homecoming, friends who travelled far just to visit — reading friends to boot! And while books may have appeared to have taken a backseat, they’ve only enriched these moments and this entire experience called living.

“That’s why I began to write… Because the paper remembers. And there may be healing in sentences.” Dear Solvej Balle, that’s why we read.

Albert Samaha: Concepcion

With its 384 pages and the sun of the Philippine flag on its cover, Concepcion was the perfect candidate to accompany this voter in anticipation of the long queues on Election Day.

“History ripples into perpetuity. Decisions, actions, mistakes, and triumphs of one day shape the days that follow, setting irreversible paths into the future…”

The book choice was especially validated by this line on page 38; the line, a double-edged sword, both encouraged and cautioned the part of myself that is gradually growing cynical toward the government and the electoral system; the line that reminded me that our choices, decisions, and votes are still of consequence.

But journalist Albert Samaha does not preach. Thankfully, he does not stop at reporting either. While he is not shy about American atrocities and their meddling with the fates of weaker nations, the repercussions of colonial subjugation, or the realities of immigration, this reader is in awe of the hakawati of the author’s Lebanese roots manifesting in pages that reveal more about his Filipino origins. This family tale that traces back to the Sultanate of Maguindanao up to the present is extensive and requires nothing less than a modern-day hakawati to tell the story.

In Concepcion, Philippine history ceases to be a structured chronology but a fluid tale that merges with the timeline of world history, personal history, and geopolitics.

Ten full days after the election, this reader finally found herself at the last page already feeling attached to the author’s artist uncle and his mother; fascinating characters that would animate fiction but who are incredibly non-fiction. Samaha writes about them the way he writes about country — with wit, fondness, love, acceptance, and hope — that by the end of the book, one would also have a rejuvenated fascination, with all its wounds and flaws, for the nation.

April in Books

April was manic. It called for two short story collections in sympathy of a fractured attention span.

Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves, Lio Mangubat First, prepare a cup of tablea tsokolate. Kapeng barako will do, but because cacao seeds arrived in the Philippines earlier than coffee through the Galleon Trade, I’ll opt for the former to pair with this book. When the chocolate brew is ready, steep yourself in the richness of both history and drink. Read full entry here.

Covert Joy, Clarice Lispector

There’s nothing here that a Clarice fan hasn’t read. And it’s arguably redundant to have this book when these twenty stories have already appeared in that hefty volume of The Complete Stories. But can you resist an edition that has one of your favorite Lispector stories as the titular story of a collection? No.

Because the thing is, reading Clarice is an experience; re-reading her is a veneration. And if I may say so, a none too covert joy.

“Sometimes I’d sit in the hammock, swinging with the book open on my lap… I was no longer a girl with a book: I was a woman with her lover.”

The Dissenters, Youssef Rakha

“…it is Time that happens to people. We talk about having and saving and wasting it as if it is ours to work with, but really it is we who are time’s property.”

Egypt’s modern history is a story of revolutions, but its revolutions are especially ones that are true to the word’s literal meaning — a return, a cycle, a recurrence. How can one analyze over seventy years of a nation’s tumultuous history from its first president up to the current one? Through a woman’s life, answers Youssef Rakha. “Woman after woman using men’s failures and her body to write the ultimate description de l’Égypte.”

Canone Inverso, Paolo Maurensig

Ironic how I have acquired and read Maurensig’s three chess novels but have only read the novel about music now; but how delightful to discover that Bach’s Chaconne is what decorates the endpaper of this edition and learn that the piece plays a role in the story! As a work of literature, Canone Inverso may not be something one would call a masterpiece, but I cannot deny how this story gripped me from beginning to end. It’s a splendid book to entertain a reading musician!

It is only post-novel that I’m finding out that there is a movie for which Ennio Morricone composed the soundtrack! (And Sophie is played by Mélanie Thierry, who is the girl in the window that inspires the pianist in Legend of 1900, but in Canone Inverso she is the pianist!) All the while I read this, I was really thinking about how it would make a cinematic feat through the vision of an insightful director. I could already hear the dramatic soundtrack and imagine the cinematography, the light coming through the windows as dusk falls on the heurigen of Grinzing, and virtuosic music piercing the air…

To the Wedding, John Berger

What shall we do before eternity?

Take our time.

Not all blurbs are to be believed. But when it’s Michael Ondaatje who writes, “Wherever I live in the world, I know I will have this book with me,” and when a friend whose literary taste is most similar to yours recommends it, you just believe. But prepare to have your heart broken.

How was it possible to write a complexly poignant novel with fragmented vignettes? How does one distinguish between poetry and prose? This book deftly blurs the lines.

The Glass Room, Simon Mawer

The Glass Room, but not the ‘room’ of English, expresses the author. Rather, the Teutonic ‘raum’ with a broader sense of space. The novel correspondingly hints at architecture while maintaining a broader sense of architecture by concerning itself beyond the architect and the building, and taking into account the lives that inhabit a particular space. Similarly, it is an acknowledgment of how one cannot write about the Modernist shift in architecture without conveying how it is an entire geopolitical and cultural movement. Read full entry here.

Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq

How do you extinguish the light in a woman’s heart?

With these short stories Banu Mushtaq seems to count the ways.

Addendum: Through a Booker discussion with Ex Libris friends a day before the awards were announced, I understood that the winner of the International Booker Prize should define 2025. As touched as I was with this book, I did not think it would fit the criterion. And yet it emerged as the winner: The first book originally published in Kannada (the official language of the author’s state of Karnataka in southern India) and the first collection of short stories to win the award.

Through this I am reminded: Woman is always relevant, and that stories of everyday life are still worth telling.

Journey to the Edge of Life, Tezer Ozlu

“It is the boundless realm of literature that has set me on this road, through words and beyond them…”

Yes, yes, and yes.

Simon Mawer: The Glass Room

“There was, however, a catch. There is always a catch, in stories as in life.”

The verdict: I could have easily stopped reading this because of the unashamed and irritating amorality of the characters. But Simon Mawer knows how to tell a story and wrap you around his finger.

It’s true what readers who occasionally dabble in cinema are saying: The Glass Room > The Brutalist. I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter admitted to taking inspiration from the former. The twisted parallels are there: Among other details, Modern man’s spiritual aloofness, characters who worship at the altar of their ego, and the pretentiousness that seems to be an essential quality of the zeitgeist.

While glass seems to reflect not the transparency but rather the fragility of human relationships and ideologies, in its un-clichéd way, this novel concedes that it is architecture that outlives and bears witness to it all.

“The Glass Room remained indifferent… Below it, lapping up to the foot of the garden, were the rough tides of those political years, while the Landauer House stood beached on the shore above the tidemark…” — The Glass Room, 2009

“…but my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube’s shoreline.” — The Brutalist, 2024

Lio Mangubat: Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves

First, prepare a cup of tablea tsokolate. Kapeng barako will do, but because cacao seeds arrived in the Philippines earlier than coffee through the Galleon Trade, I’ll opt for the former to pair with this book. When the chocolate brew is ready, steep yourself in the richness of both history and drink.

Every essay in this collection discloses an aspect of Philippine history that this reader was oblivious to: Mindanao was once christened “Caesarea,” Spanish maps reveal that “ships could sail in straight from the West Philippine Sea, into Balayan Bay and up a causeway straight into Taal Lake.”

But this book does not contain mere trivia: The essays also confront Manila’s dark chapters. Swastika Manila tells of how the claws of Nazism managed to reach the Philippines, and in Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves, it is exposed how Manila unfortunately became the center of the Transpacific slave trade.

Also, a Broadway show that premiered in 1902 called The Sultan of Sulu?! Written by anti-imperialist, George Ade, whose work has been praised by Mark Twain; at first glance, an unflattering and fictional depiction of a sultan of Sulu, but fundamentally a satire on America’s colonial designs in the region. It went on to have a sold-out run of 192 shows.

And while I’ve been aware of how Filipinos dominate the world of music gigs in cruise ships and clubs nowadays, thanks to Mangubat’s exploration into colonial archives there is a record showing that this is not a recent phenomenon. Over a hundred years ago, a group of talented Filipinos earned a reputation for being “foreign piano devils” when a Spanish bandmaster brought nineteen musicians to the port city of Shanghai in 1881!

The aforementioned are just the tip of the iceberg, however. It’s a book every Filipino should have on their shelf. These long-forgotten stories from Philippine colonial times have a way of making the past come alive beyond the usual facts and dates we’ve been required to memorize in our school years. Mangubat does not merely reiterate the details he uncovers through research but strings the tales captivatingly and transmits his enthusiasm for history to the reader.

As I relish in how readable these essays are, I am reminded of a historian’s line from I, Claudius: “For every word I wrote I must have read many hundreds.” Our generation is fortunate to have a Lio Mangubat in our midst who does the hard work for us and renders history a vital and accessible thing.

This reader is eager for a second cup and a second volume!

Women’s Month Summary

Blood Feast, Malika Moustadraf

Malika Moustadraf is Morocco’s answer to Egypt’s Nawal el Saadawi whose depictions of how women are viewed and treated are unflinching. But Malika has a distinct style that draws the reader right into a scene, into the midst and into the cracks of such a society, sometimes forcing us to look through the eyes of the scoundrels themselves. I daresay she is the more masterful fiction writer. Fiction, as we know, is just a tool to reveal the rawest of truths. Read full entry here.

A Woman is a School, Celine Semaan

Even though this one did not exceed my expectations, it has its merits. I love how she writes of art as “the ultimate act of giving.” It may be enlightening to someone younger who is reading about the effects of colonialism for the first time, but readers may find more substantial memoirs and more informative books on Lebanon and Lebanese culture, and better books that encourage attentiveness to social justice.

The Dictionary of Lost Words, Pip Williams

An exceedingly apt book for Women’s Month that would also make a splendid companion read to Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman. It is this one that left my heart with a tender aching.

“Never forget that… Words are our tools of resurrection.”

The Book of Disappearance, Ibtisam Azem

In another Palestinian masterpiece, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, the entire book is a bullet in motion that hits you with a staggering force on the very last page. There is an abrupt and brutal finality. There is no closure in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. It ends without a concluding cadence and leaves the reader suspended in an unsettling limbo. But that does not imply that this book pales in comparison. Perhaps we are given a nanoscopic glimpse of what it feels like to be Palestinian. Read full entry here.

We Do Not Part, Han Kang

“Extermination was the goal. Exterminate what? The reds.” But Jeju’s inhabitants were not all reds, and yet it was easier for the military to operate by decimating the population. For nearly fifty years after the massacre, it was a crime punishable by law for a South Korean to mention the event. A huge percentage of the thousands that perished were innocent.

“Collateral damage.” That’s what they call it. Now where have I heard that term recently? Read full entry here.

Cold Nights of Childhood, Tezer Ozlu

Bursts of beauty in the prose amidst a stream of surreal disclosures from a woman grappling with mental illness and electroshock therapy. But it is ultimately a sad and disturbing portrayal of a particular societal context and its effect on the psyche, framed affectionately by Aysegul Savas’ introduction and Maureen Freely’s translator’s note. Read full entry here.

Light: Monet at Giverny, Eva Figes

An impressionist painting in book form with the most elegant feminism I have ever read.

“I’m sitting at the restaurant reading. Some books take me to worlds far greater and more tender than real life.” This line was lifted from Tezer Ozlu. She could have been referring to this book. Amidst the cacophony of social media and political rants, my mind is thankful to have been transported and softened by such a beautiful, beautiful book!

Three Filipino Women, F. Sionil Jose

This reader’s Women’s Month has usually been reserved for reading women authors, but an exception had to be made for this. Curious as to how a man would paint a portrait of the Filipino woman, I soon realized that this is more portrait of Philippine politics than it is of the Filipino woman. It is a dismal but virtuosic depiction. Three women: A politician, a prostitute, and a student activist. Maybe parable, maybe allegory, maybe both. Beyond death, F. Sionil Jose reminds me, once again, that he was the closest thing the Filipinos had to a Nobel laureate in literature.

Robert Graves: I, Claudius

In the heat of the 2022 election season, I read two of literature’s Roman Empire trinity: Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian and John Williams’ Augustus. It was, perhaps, a subconscious response to how my nation’s “history” was being crafted to suit narratives while facts were being doubted and ridiculed.

The novels led me to plead that if we dare to question history, we need also the courage to question our motives and ask ourselves what kind of people our convictions empower. That we have the son of the dictator as president is proof that my plea was futile.

As political temperatures rise once again, simply because the very same people who refused to listen to history are stewing in the consequence of their choices, I found myself drawn to Robert Graves’ I, Claudius.

Writers are discouraged to begin any piece of writing with “I”. It’s clever how this book pretends to break that rule with its title and then proceeds to construct the story, not of one man, but of an empire. While I prefer the elegant prose of Hadrian and favor the compassion with which Augustus treats its subjects, especially the women, Claudius completes the trinity with its wit and brilliant insight into the inner workings of politics, power, and the process of writing history.

“…there are two ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth… and perhaps they are not irreconcilable.”

I, Claudius renders many books inconsequential and makes a reader wonder why they beat around the bush before undertaking it. The OG Game of Thrones but better, if Robert Graves will allow me such language.

Reading about corrupt rulers draining the treasury, entertaining the masses with shallow amusements and feeding them with false narratives, and all the political maneuvering and violence tells me that we have not come very far. The only difference is that, at a time when the Roman Empire transitioned from representative democracy to centralized imperial authority, the people were not to blame for electing crooks.

Tezer Ozlu: Cold Nights of Childhood

*“I’m sitting in the restaurant reading. Some books take me to worlds far greater and more tender than real life.”*

Amidst a stream of surreal disclosures from a woman grappling with mental illness and electroshock therapy, bursts of beauty in the prose.

“I want to wander down these streets and avenues, drinking everything I see, making new discoveries, watching these people who remain strangers to me, all around me, this unquenchable life that I so long to take into my heart. Could it be that there are others who find whole worlds in a single moment, who marvel in the miracle of existence, whose thoughts can purge into the depths of unfettered time and rapture? I don’t know. A single moment can hold an eternity.”

But it is ultimately a sad and disturbing portrait of a particular societal context and its effect on the psyche, framed affectionately by Aysegul Savas’ introduction and Maureen Freely’s translator’s note.

Reading this brought to mind Leonora Carrington’s Down Below, and reading this reminded me that sometimes the point of literature is not to read only about women’s lives that appeal to the reader, but to have one’s eyes opened to different kinds of suffering if only to achieve a better understanding of the world we live in.

It’s a book I can only recommend to a select few, but I know the Turkish section of my shelf is richer for compassionately clasping it to its bosom.

Han Kang: We Do Not Part

*“In every story, without exception, the woman looks back. She turns to stone on the spot.”*

“Because Koreans don’t win the Nobel prize for literature,” says the young Nora in Past Lives when Hae Sung asked the aspiring writer why she was moving to Canada.

As much as I love that film that’s lodged in a heart space that I thought was only reserved for the Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy, I was glad Nora proved to be wrong when Han Kang became the first Korean and the first female Asian writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Lauded for her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” it then became a goal to read Han Kang for Women’s Month this year.

It is one of the most atmospheric books I’ve read. I can almost feel the snowflakes falling on my heart until now.

The novel takes place on Jeju Island, a place that I regarded merely as a popular vacation spot thanks to KDrama and the island’s visa-free policy for Filipinos. It also drew international attention on December 29, 2024, when a Jeju Air flight overshot the runway and resulted in 179 fatalities. That’s all I knew of Jeju — until I read this.

What begins as a woman having a series of nightmares and discernibly living with an unnamed trauma, builds suspense when a friend in the hospital asks her to rescue a pet bird that was left alone at home after an accident occurred. What Kyungha discovers in her friend Inseon’s home in the dead of winter gradually opens her eyes to the Jeju massacre of 1948. It is such a hallucinatory reading experience that I had to verify if something that horrific really happened in idyllic Jeju Island’s history.

“Collateral damage.” That’s what they call it. Now where have I heard that term recently?

Ibtisam Azem: The Book of Disappearance

“What if all Palestinians vanished from their homeland overnight?”

This is the line that greets the reader on its French flap. Longlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, one would think that the question, and the novel, are a response to the Gaza War. Although uncannily timely, it was written in 2014.

In this story, all Palestinians disappear. There is fear, relief, and even joy. “This problem disappeared on its own. It is a divine miracle,” remarked one Israeli. Ariel, a journalist and liberal Zionist, tries to figure out what really happened and looks for traces by reading his missing friend Alaa’s letters to a dead grandmother.

The book is semi-epistolary as it alternates between Ariel’s articles and Alaa’s letters. In a clever contrast, Ariel’s articles look toward the uncertain future, while Alaa’s letters look into the past. “Perhaps I am writing out of fear. Against forgetfulness. I write to remember and to remind, so memories are not erased. Memory is my last lifeline.”

The articles and the poignant letters reveal the disparity of their personal histories: One looks at the same city as the Jaffa his people had lost; while one looks at it as Tel Aviv, with its Bauhaus architecture, the dream that came true.

There is no closure in Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance. It ends without a concluding cadence and leaves the reader suspended in an unsettling limbo. But that does not imply that this book pales in comparison. Perhaps we are given a nanoscopic glimpse of what it feels like to be Palestinian.