Six
Six
Posted 00:42am (Mla time) Feb 15, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 15, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
(Concluded)
"THE GOD of Small Things" is one of those things that seem to be going nowhere until you reach the end when everything makes perfect sense. It shifts back and forth in time, uncoils its details like a snake, talks among many things -- about the ancientness and modern-ness of India, and the continuities and breaks between the generations. Everything seems to revolve around the drowning of an English girl who has come to visit a family in Kerala. But like the many manifestations of Shiva, it isn't quite all.
What it is in the end is -- a love story. One that defies more than the murderous enmity between feuding families, one that defies more than even death itself: One that defies the most ancient of India's taboos, which is for an upper class person, particularly a woman, bedding down with an Untouchable man. And its earthshaking consequences, which reveal the best and worst of India, the best and worst in human beings.
What raises "The God of Small Things" heads and shoulders above most things you've read is its language. It completely reinvents it. Here is writing where you truly cannot separate form and substance. The form is the substance, the language is the story. This is storytelling that grows in your brain while it tugs at your heart. I leave the reader to discover this magical experience all by herself.
Ha Jin's "Waiting" is a love story with a twist: It turns out to be the one thing St. Teresa de Avila warned against, which is an answered prayer. An answered prayer is often worse than unanswered one. Lin, a doctor in Mao's China, meets a young volunteer, Manna, and slowly -- this is China, nothing happens fast, except executions -- falls in love with her. There is only one problem: He is married. His marriage, of course, was arranged, but no matter, it is binding and carries with it all sorts of legal sanctions and political repercussions. So Lin waits, for what seems like forever. His application for divorce depends on his wife's consent, and his wife doesn't particularly care to give it. Not out of spite but out of not knowing where to go to afterward. Lin himself feels guilty: his wife took care of his ailing parents when he wasn't around, which was nearly all the time.
It's in the details you'll find the story, in the curious mating, or courtship, rituals invented by China and Mao. Love in the time of cholera finds its counterpart in love in the time of reconstruction. The twist happens toward the end: Lin does get his girl after a couple of decades or so, and discovers that love isn't all it's cranked up to be. Or that a man's reach should always truly exceed his grasp because what's grasped tends to cease to be heaven. Or "happily ever after" is a contradiction in terms. I'll leave things dangling there, or leave the reader's curiosity to push him to find out what happens.
A strange, luminous and dazzling piece of work is Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." I wouldn't be surprised if Murakami is soon short-listed among the Nobel nominees, he's a genius. "Wind-Up" is surreal without the verbal extravagance of the Latin American magic realists, without the ponderous detail of the Russian and American realists; philosophical without the abstract transcendentalism of the Asian mystics. The sensibility is at once uniquely Japanese and eerily universal (the collective unconscious?). The word that leaps to mind is "weird," but a kind of weirdness that isn't unpleasant, not unlike some Japanese anime. It's like looking at a common object and finding it the strangest thing in the world, recognizable and unfamiliar, the same thing but different at the same time.
A young man, Toru Okada, starts out by looking for a lost cat, he ends up by looking for his lost wife. Or a wife that left him because she fell for another man, or did she? Nothing is as it seems. His quest brings him to enter many worlds and see strange-familiar things, such as the postwar history of Japan and the eternal history of his soul. It's the kind of book that makes for easy and hard reading at the same time. You fly through it only to realize you haven't gone very far. Does he find his wife in the end? Well, it's part of the magic of the book that's not so easy to answer.
The last is one that has raised a furor over the last decades because of its outrageous theme. That is Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," a novel that has been dismissed as a glorification of pedophilia and hailed (as one critic puts it) as the only true love story of the 20th century. It's the story of a middle-aged man who falls in love with a pubescent girl, or since many will object to the word "love," becomes obsessed with her. It is a testament to Nabokov's genius, at least, that he is able to give a convincing argument for love. The book has been interpreted in every possible way, from satire to indulgence, and there's probably a grain of truth to much of it. Its literary stature though is indisputable and well earned. It's in the language, too, where you find the story, as tour de force as you can get, and from a Russian émigré writing in English yet. You certainly will not look at the world, or at human relationships, the same way again. You'll marvel at the vastness or mysteriousness of the human mind, or heart.
You can't get laid this Valentine, lay your head down with these. Of course, truth being stranger than fiction -- something you get to glimpse as you grow older -- you'll also find the best love stories right in front of you, in real life. I just spotted one recently in an item we had on our front page, in the union between two male comrades in the communist movement. Defiant love in the trenches: Now there's something waiting to be told.
But that is quite another story.
Posted 00:42am (Mla time) Feb 15, 2005
By Conrado de Quiros
Inquirer News Service
Editor's Note: Published on page A14 of the February 15, 2005 issue of the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
(Concluded)
"THE GOD of Small Things" is one of those things that seem to be going nowhere until you reach the end when everything makes perfect sense. It shifts back and forth in time, uncoils its details like a snake, talks among many things -- about the ancientness and modern-ness of India, and the continuities and breaks between the generations. Everything seems to revolve around the drowning of an English girl who has come to visit a family in Kerala. But like the many manifestations of Shiva, it isn't quite all.
What it is in the end is -- a love story. One that defies more than the murderous enmity between feuding families, one that defies more than even death itself: One that defies the most ancient of India's taboos, which is for an upper class person, particularly a woman, bedding down with an Untouchable man. And its earthshaking consequences, which reveal the best and worst of India, the best and worst in human beings.
What raises "The God of Small Things" heads and shoulders above most things you've read is its language. It completely reinvents it. Here is writing where you truly cannot separate form and substance. The form is the substance, the language is the story. This is storytelling that grows in your brain while it tugs at your heart. I leave the reader to discover this magical experience all by herself.
Ha Jin's "Waiting" is a love story with a twist: It turns out to be the one thing St. Teresa de Avila warned against, which is an answered prayer. An answered prayer is often worse than unanswered one. Lin, a doctor in Mao's China, meets a young volunteer, Manna, and slowly -- this is China, nothing happens fast, except executions -- falls in love with her. There is only one problem: He is married. His marriage, of course, was arranged, but no matter, it is binding and carries with it all sorts of legal sanctions and political repercussions. So Lin waits, for what seems like forever. His application for divorce depends on his wife's consent, and his wife doesn't particularly care to give it. Not out of spite but out of not knowing where to go to afterward. Lin himself feels guilty: his wife took care of his ailing parents when he wasn't around, which was nearly all the time.
It's in the details you'll find the story, in the curious mating, or courtship, rituals invented by China and Mao. Love in the time of cholera finds its counterpart in love in the time of reconstruction. The twist happens toward the end: Lin does get his girl after a couple of decades or so, and discovers that love isn't all it's cranked up to be. Or that a man's reach should always truly exceed his grasp because what's grasped tends to cease to be heaven. Or "happily ever after" is a contradiction in terms. I'll leave things dangling there, or leave the reader's curiosity to push him to find out what happens.
A strange, luminous and dazzling piece of work is Haruki Murakami's "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." I wouldn't be surprised if Murakami is soon short-listed among the Nobel nominees, he's a genius. "Wind-Up" is surreal without the verbal extravagance of the Latin American magic realists, without the ponderous detail of the Russian and American realists; philosophical without the abstract transcendentalism of the Asian mystics. The sensibility is at once uniquely Japanese and eerily universal (the collective unconscious?). The word that leaps to mind is "weird," but a kind of weirdness that isn't unpleasant, not unlike some Japanese anime. It's like looking at a common object and finding it the strangest thing in the world, recognizable and unfamiliar, the same thing but different at the same time.
A young man, Toru Okada, starts out by looking for a lost cat, he ends up by looking for his lost wife. Or a wife that left him because she fell for another man, or did she? Nothing is as it seems. His quest brings him to enter many worlds and see strange-familiar things, such as the postwar history of Japan and the eternal history of his soul. It's the kind of book that makes for easy and hard reading at the same time. You fly through it only to realize you haven't gone very far. Does he find his wife in the end? Well, it's part of the magic of the book that's not so easy to answer.
The last is one that has raised a furor over the last decades because of its outrageous theme. That is Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita," a novel that has been dismissed as a glorification of pedophilia and hailed (as one critic puts it) as the only true love story of the 20th century. It's the story of a middle-aged man who falls in love with a pubescent girl, or since many will object to the word "love," becomes obsessed with her. It is a testament to Nabokov's genius, at least, that he is able to give a convincing argument for love. The book has been interpreted in every possible way, from satire to indulgence, and there's probably a grain of truth to much of it. Its literary stature though is indisputable and well earned. It's in the language, too, where you find the story, as tour de force as you can get, and from a Russian émigré writing in English yet. You certainly will not look at the world, or at human relationships, the same way again. You'll marvel at the vastness or mysteriousness of the human mind, or heart.
You can't get laid this Valentine, lay your head down with these. Of course, truth being stranger than fiction -- something you get to glimpse as you grow older -- you'll also find the best love stories right in front of you, in real life. I just spotted one recently in an item we had on our front page, in the union between two male comrades in the communist movement. Defiant love in the trenches: Now there's something waiting to be told.
But that is quite another story.
posted by Dante at 12:42 AM
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