To read the English translation of filmmaker and Ateneo college professor Alvin Yapan’s book Worship the Body (Sambahin Ang Katawan) is to be awash in a sea of images. Of clothing revealing nakedness (between man and wife, and man and fellow man). Of sea and sky, lands urban and rural. While acclaim and praise follow… Read More Worship The Body: What Price Love?
Every beginning of November, Filipinos reenact the ancient tradition of going home to one’s province, to the land that birthed us, to the cemeteries that still house the fleshly remains of our ancestors. This story begins, and ends, in such a graveyard. Books and plays inspired by them are always two different art forms, yet… Read More Balete / Tree : F. Sionil Jose’s Word Made Flesh by Tanghalang Pilipino
If author Ronaldo S. Vivo Jr.’s aim is to leave readers devastated, if the intention is to give us no respite from cruelty or from descriptions of material and moral filth, if the purpose is to shove this country’s reality in our faces when we would prefer to look away, then The Power Above Us… Read More The Power Above Us All: Today’s Trauma in Translation
Douglas Candano’s collection of eight stories are all set in one universe that feels so much like ours, but defy Newtonian physics in its population that includes amalgamations of aswang and the Chinese jiangshi, as well as museums that house experiences rather than relics, and historical events with a few monsters thrown in the mix.… Read More Infinite Lives, Infinite Deaths: Chillingly Cold Prose Delivers 8 Doses of Fil-Chi Horror
My second book by Catherine Dellosa had me sobbing uncontrollably in the last couple of chapters, making my Sunday morning coffee a bit more salty than usual. It also has one of the most striking opening paragraphs I’ve ever come across: “Fate is fixed, love is a thunderstorm, and Cheetos are mankind’s greatest invention since… Read More The Summer of Letting Go: Catherine Dellosa Guides Us How to Deal with Loss and Love
“There was no measure for love of country except in sacrifice.” The beginning is all. The first scene in a play or a movie sets tone and mood, introduces characters and themes. For man, they say the infant is the father to the grownup. And for this widely-acknowledged literary masterpiece, Po-on is the first yet… Read More Po-on : The First/Last in F. Sionil Jose’s Saga
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