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I don't love you but you've got great boobs, Tita
Here I go again... I've just finished reading Gamalinda's first novel, Planet Waves. After flipping the first few pages, I could no longer put it down, thank God I've got a free week-end. What is this novel all about? A lot. Reading it reminded me of many authors and styles that surprised me page after page after page. I surmised it as a historical novel, then perhaps a fantasy novel, or a mystery, a piece of magic realism, and not far from it, science fiction with a moral lesson. It's all of the above. I preferred to keep my judgements to myself while reading it in one sitting. After finishing it, I pressed the blue-bearing-a-black-and-white-man-with-wings-cover against my chest and whispered "Aaaah". I rarely do that with a novel. Not that I'm a sicko or somethin'...No, I didn't masturbate or ejaculate...it was better than that, and pardon my metaphors, the novel brought me to the highest level of orgasmic pride. Call it the Filipino's surprise. Because... this Filipino pen brought to me Gabriel Marquez, Kafka, Jean Genet, Camus, even Dostoyevsky in one stroke. There is nothing sentimental about Planet Waves, in fact, it seemed to avoid sentimentality, it's neither your classic Dickensian or Jamesian kind'o fiction. It deals simply with a young Manileno, Joaquin Alfonso. His upbringing is ordinarily dreary until his discovery of his dead grandfather's secret writings that revolve around planets and the sun. Etcetera. And sees his mother doing tricks in a porn movie screen. With a friend Bart who is rich enough to have goons beat up the gym guys who insulted them. The same Bart who jerks himself off while watching Joaquin make love with an older hooker. An eccentric grandmother. A domineering father that has clashes with a son, clashes violent enough to make you re-think your typical Filipino family values. Nothing afterall, is traditional here. Here is a family of extramarital affairs, colorized by a transexual bastard, stigmatized by a stepmother whose nipples are bitten by her stepson. And parting lines, "No, I don't love you but you've got great boobs." Quite similar to Gabriel Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, this novel revolves around an old Manila house being threatened by demolition because it stands on public/government lot. Two main characters, Amiranta(grandmother) and Joaquin(grandson) are frantically searching for the house and lot titles which were in the hands of Miguel Tomas de Andrade(grandfather) until his death, being pinned in an elevator door. Where those papers are appears to be the main plot. Subplots involve Joaquin's mother leaving for good only to end up in bomba films; renting a part of the house to Eileen who has a beautiful daughter named Melissa. Joaquin falls for Melissa so does Bart(the rich friend), and guess who wins? Failing in family and love affairs, Joaquin releases his adolescence angsts by lifting weights. He becomes so sexy that even his father's querida, later stepmom, Rachel Guzman, seduces him. Rachel Guzman has a bastard gay son by Joaquin's dad. He's Lester. Lester has a talent for selling fashionalbe clothes to alta-sociedad but has a weakness for boys in the neighborhood and his nocturnal sojourns elicit more crises in Joaquin's troubled life. Now here is one fascinating example of Filipino virility: Joaquin and Lester are of the same age. Both first borns. Conceived at the same time. By two different women.On their father's wedding day! Dios ko! The characters pinned me on my chair - Joaquin is an unsuspecting dealer of his father's guns. Rachel Guzman has kabuki-like make-up and three dozen eye lines, who enforces her querida rule in the house. Grandmother Amiranta is guided by some mysterious knowledge about their future. Her fate is known to her since her younger years. Entering into his twenties, Joaquin is "forced" into finding a job like his stepbrother Lester. He manages to write articles that pays him pittance. He keeps working out in the gym hoping to win a 1,500 peso booty in a body-building/weight lifting contest. Then he wakes up with painful scapulae. Two lumps start appearing on his back forming into stumps from where feathers sprout into wings. Joaquin becomes a winged creature who never flies - As if the author is avoiding the temptation of turning Joaquin into Darna, the wings are snipped by two thugs and Joaquin becomes normal again. Utilizing the novel form of self- destruction, the characters slowly disintegrate as one by one, they lose thier lives in most violent manners. Eric Gamalinda doesn't hesitate to narrate in most specific detail, how Lester's throat is cut by a hustler, how Joaquin's father, suffering from stroke, is gunned down inside his very own bedroom, how glaucoma-eyed Eileen is run down by a truck, how Melissa turns into a whore, why, even the rich Bart is about to strangle another prostitute. If these characters and story are treated this way, it is for a reason. Gamalinda, I think, is raising a human point - that life is like a wave - dancing, coming, disappearing. Call it the impermanence of time, as exemplified by the meeting between Joaquin and his grandfather in a dream. Of course I cannot convey the full depth and meaning of Gamalinda's point in this book review. The novel Planet Waves has a lot more to say than this. Gamalinda to me has managed to juxtapose history with fiction and all its varying forms - from magic to science to horror to fantasy to dreams. What makes this novel fascinating is its abrupt and unexpected twists, the sudden transformations of characters, even their conflagrations. Gamalinda even succeeds to create "a dream within a dream, all that jazz" scenario. The biggest surprise is this: after you've got entangled with the entire story and somehow believed in the characters, Gamlinda seems to laugh out saying, "All this is make-believe, here is the real truth." The truth however is another untruth. That is the beauty of fiction. The final imagery articulates what the novel is all about. As Joaquin watches the fight between two men in Quiapo, he notices a child on the sideline, picking up a strayed apple, and raising it to his mouth, he bites and chews it while staring at the world with firm and defiant eyes. This is a story of human defiance and bravery. Eric, thanks for making me believe, again, in the Filipino author. about the author Eric Gamalinda, winner of the Centennial Award for Novel, was born in 1956 and attended the University of Santo Tomas and the University of the Philippines. He was appointed local fellow for poetry in 1983 by the UP Creative Writing Center, for which he submitted Popular Delusions, a collection of poems. He has published an earlier collection of verse, Fire Poem/Rain Poem (Oriental Media, 1976). He has won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Award for a one act play(1981), poetry (1985) and a Focus magazine award for poetry (1981). He has been published in Frank, a Paris based journal. He is an associate fellow of the Philippine Literary Arts Council. |
Volume 1 |
Alex Maskara |
