Musings on Nick Joaquin's A QUESTION OF HEROES (Part 2)

"For wealth bred insolence, the insolence of grandeur."

Behold the Propaganda, "a sophisticated movement, conducted with pen and word, seeking reform, preaching enlightenment." 

The next two chapters in the book were supposedly about the propagandists Marcelo H. del Pilar and Graciano Lopez-Jaena, but to my surprise, Nick Joaquin brought up other, less well-known names.

With the economic boom in the 1800's came wealth and privilege to Filipinos, and when rich families sent their sons to study in Europe, they started campaigning for reforms back at home. 

Nick Joaquin wrote glowingly of Gregorio Sanciangco, a Chinese mestizo whose book EL PROGRESO DE FILIPINAS (1881) was "THE epiphany that started the Propaganda." He set down what other propagandists merely echoed in their appeals to the Spanish court.

I was quite dismayed to read the portrayal of Graciano Lopez-Jaena, whose brilliance was not used to the fullest because he was incapable of holding down a job, too busy drinking and using up funds given by countrymen in fleeting pleasures.

It saddened me to read how a very contemporary problem visited our heroes a century ago: embezzlement and misappropriation of funds to be used for the country. Not even "the great Lopez-Jaena" was exempt from corruption.

Lopez-Jaena, in the end, washed his hands of the movement, and even spoke ill against his former partner-patriot, Marcelo H. del Pilar! The audacity. He had the gall to beg for more funds (after misusing earlier monies) so he could campaign for politics in Spain. The nerve. Joaquin puts it bluntly: "He used the Propaganda movement to freeload."

Saddened by what he saw his countrymen do abroad, Rizal wrote: 

"If our countrymen place their hopes in us here in Europe they are certainly mistaken. The help we can give them is our lives in our country... the medicine must be brought near to the sick man."

Same sickness, different century. The struggle continues.

                                               (Graciano Lopez-Jaena)

                                                (Marcelo H. del Pilar)

                                                (Gregorio Sanciangco)

Musings on Nick Joaquin's A QUESTION OF HEROES (Part 1):

I thought I'd share my learnings as I read this treasure, something I've picked up again on this day dedicated to national heroes (primarily for my own memory! Hehe, as I'd like Facebook to remind me of these posts in the future).

The book is divided into 14 chapters, featuring the different men (alas, no heroines are featured!) whose actions shaped our nation today.

National Artist Nick Joaquin entitled each chapter with a question, the first one being "How 'Filipino' was Burgos?"

Joaquin reminds us that the term "Filipino" originally referred to the Spanish mestizo (he uses the term "Creole"), but that this changed with the Cavite Mutiny of 1872, and that this united Filipinos of different ethnic backgrounds versus the Spanish oppressor. Two such Creoles were Padre Gomez and Burgos themselves.

A peace-loving man, one who "sought reform within the law, disliked violent upheaval, concerned with liberating the masses through education," is wrongfully accused of inciting bloody revolution.

And no, Joaquin is referring not to Jose Rizal nor his literary creation, Ibarra, but Padre Jose Burgos.

Textbooks often treat the 3 martyr priests as one entity: "Gomburza," but it was fascinating to read of how Zamora was arrested by accident (the warrant was for JOSE Zamora, not Padre Jacinto whose only misfortune was to be the co-curate of the REAL hero, Burgos), of Gomez's activism in his youth but how he was only punished for it when he was already 85 and had accepted the status quo, and of the glorious promise of Burgos whose dizzying rise to power threatened the foreign friars to the point that they invented an excuse to have him killed.

Joaquin writes of the accidental nature of heroism, and how society changes in its treatment of heroes depending on the times ("Even Aguinaldo, from the 1900's to the 1950's, was regarded as more villain than patriot.").

When we celebrate our heroes today, we would do well to reflect whether we have always seen them as thus. Or has their memory been sanitized and purged of past wrong doing, and towards what end?

(Picture of the execution borrowed off the Internet)

Book Review: SCANDAL by Shusaku Endo

Scandal by Shūsaku Endō
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"A true religion should be able to respond to the dark melodies, the faulty and hideous sounds that echo from the hearts of men."

My fifth Shusaku Endo book is the one I liked least. The Observer's blurb at the back said it all: "Endo's superb novel offers only an unforgettable bafflement for an answer."

Written in 1986, it was one of his last works, and it is definitely the most horrid one. I think it is autobiographical in nature, because the protagonist is an aging writer who learns of a doppelganger haunting the most seedy parts of Tokyo, doing all sorts of un-Christian, depraved things that shocked even this seasoned reader. Is his double a supernatural being, or does he have an alternate personality he doesn't know about? Or is he being lied to? Read SCANDAL to find out!

While previous Endo novels didn't shy away from the topic of sin, I think what makes SCANDAL unique is its unabashed examination of eros among the aged. I had to put the book down several times because some parts utterly disgusted me. But then, Endo would call me a hypocrite, one of those "who close their eyes to the darkest depths of the human heart and try to cover it up."

I WILL say this, though. None of what he wrote came off as gratuitous nor sensationalized. The unsavory parts were, for all intents and purposes, necessary.

"The most important thing is to write about humanity," Endo wrote, and that includes sin -- which, Endo argues, is different from Evil.

What is the connection with sensuality and Catholicism? All the sense are acknowledged and utilized in the Catholic tradition. Unlike other brother/sister faiths, which shy away from certain types of music or interior decoration, Catholicism understands that there are many ways to transcendence. The eye beholds the majesty and glory of art, which points to the majesty and glory of Divinity. The ear rejoices in Mozart's masses. Scents of incense and the tactile sensation of singing as one community in worship. All these things CAN be good, as our senses are God's gifts to us with which to see the beauty of His world.

Quoting Baudelaire, "in the eyes of Thou who knowest why we exist and why we were created - are we monsters?" Endo would argue that there is beauty in ugliness, and that art's purpose is to reveal it.

While I do not find this book beautiful, I have found beauty in Endo's other works. And so I shall remain on the lookout for this Catholic writer who writes like no other.

In our book club's discussion earlier, we got to talking about Japanese authors in general and how complex some of them are.

Endo offers this framework in this novel:

1) Writers who essentially prefer harmony in their lives - "a well-constructed unity" (Mushanokoji and Yamamoto Yuzo)

2) Biophilous authors who love life (Goethe)

3) Necrophilous, self-destructive authors: those more absorbed with darkness and the past than with a neatly ordered future (Dozai Osamu)

I wonder which category Endo would place himself under? Because there are elements in his work that make him an arguable representative for all three.

For convenience's sake, I mentally file him with Graham Greene under "Catholic literature," but with a Japanese's lived experience permeating his work: the experience of belonging to a minority, inwardly.

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Book Review: STALINGRAD by Vassily Grossman

Stalingrad by Vasily Grossman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"And here, perhaps, lies humanity's greatest hope: great deeds can be accomplished by simple, ordinary people."

I first saw a copy of this eye-catching red spine in the beautiful reading nook of a friend, and I remember thinking, "I'd like to read that yummy-looking book."

Fast forward a few months, and after a very convincing testimony during our book club's monthly meet up, I ordered STALINGRAD. The very name evokes balalaika and male choir music running in my head, with images from the immortal film ENEMY AT THE GATES.

A novel on the Battle of Stalingrad written by someone who was actually there?!? My idea of a book-to-spend-the-three-day-weekend-with!

STALINGRAD is like the 2021 DUNE movie: extremely long setups for what comes after.

* insert groan *

At 900+ pages, this must be the LONGEST prequel ever!

While the book has its moments, I must admit I was a bit repelled by the very strong overtones of Soviet propaganda (with lines like "Within him, in all its fulness, he felt the strongest, truest force in the world - that of a working man"). Reading this book reminded me of college English courses where we had to read shorter excerpts of Soviet social realism, so similar were the literary flavors.

For me, the best bit was Chapter 30, with seven pages of the author's take on how Hitler managed to get voted into power, when he stood for mediocrity and all that is base in man.

"After being defeated in 1918, Germany was looking for a Hitler, and she found him."

Grossman said Hitler's rise to power was made possible by his "philosophy of inner impotence," which was "equally attractive to dregs and failures."

And after winning, he "silenced all dissent, transforming Germany into an intellectual desert."

Grossman proceeds to question the Hitler myth of greatness: "Can we call someone a great man if he has not brought into people's lives a single atom of good, a single atom of freedom and intelligence?"

If the book category is "WWII experiences by people who lived through it," I would recommend Svetlana Alexievich's THE UNWOMANLY FACE OF WAR over Grossman's. It's quite evident that Grossman sanitized his work because of censorship, and couldn't help but put party-approved lines in the mouths of his characters, which somewhat detracted from the overall emotional impact of what could have been a true epic.

Then again, Grossman saw STALINGRAD and the sequel LIFE AND FATE as one complete work, so perhaps I'd better get a move on reading the next book posthaste.



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Book Review: VOLCANO by Shusaku Endo (translated by Richard A. Schuchert)

Volcano by Shūsaku Endō
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"A volcano resembles human life. In youth it gives rein to the passions, and burns with fire. It spurts out lava. But when it grows old, it assumes the burden of those past evil deeds. It turns deathly quiet..."

I picked up this my fourth Endo novel while fresh from a rather hefty tome (anything above 350 pages is, for me, considered a doorstopper) and needing something shorter to read on this Sunday morning, before I work again in the afternoon.

When I look back on how busy pre-pandemic Sundays were (running to church and then to do groceries at the mall, family lunch and perhaps squeeze in a play or concert, or movie), I think pandemic Sundays offer more in terms of opportunity for both spiritual renewal and, let's face it, getting up to speed on work (C'est la vie, in "the next normal" of education). Who knew so much time would be freed up when one hides away from crowded malls?

Shusaku Endo is, fittingly, meant to be read on Sundays. Reading his books is similar to what Catholics feel when at church, listening to a particularly good sermon (which, like good books, are not as common as they ought to be and should be prized for their rarity). There is the mirror held up (behold your sins), the shame, then the resolve to be better. The better the sermon and the more respected the priest, the higher the likelihood of Sunday thought to be carried out to weekday action.

We have in VOLCANO the usual Catholic literature style of exposing people's most sinful thoughts. Like Graham Greene, Shusaku Endo does not shy away from putting on paper those most shameful desires of ours, the full spectrum of human pettiness and depravity made permanent on paper.

But while his other works seemed to end more hopefully, VOLCANO is unusually darker and morbid, plus it ends so ambiguously that this reader (who, like a good Catholic, wants her endings to end if not happily then at least with finality) is left with a disquiet soul.

This MAY be the point. While other brands of Christianity offer assurance in the forms of automatic salvation, Catholicism does not remove personal responsibility. There is no free pass, no matter how many masses or confessions one attends, because each person needs to put in the work to live Christ-like, daily, amidst all the world's evil.

Broken contracts. Dishonor. Mean thoughts against family members. Hypocrisy. The novel rings as true now as it was when Endo wrote this in 1959: "Evil itself is a volcano that will never be extinct."

Two men occupy neighboring rooms in a local hospital in Japan. One is a retired scientist who spent his whole life studying the (fictional) volcano Akadeke. The other is a defrocked foreign priest whose overflowing bitterness stems from envy and a "lust for controlling the lives of others."

You would think that this is a set up for a debate on religion versus science, or turn into a disaster thriller.

But this is Shusaku Endo, whom one reads because, like the master of human nature that he is, his works are unpredictable.

Endo writes of shared humanity. The two men have nothing in common... except a shared obsession with the volcano's fate (will it erupt or not?) and the sinfulness of living selfish, love-less lives. This loneliness in old age comes for both, never mind that one followed society's script and raised a family, while the other broke his order's rules every chance he got. The price of two cold hearts.

Genuine love, Endo reminds us, is not borne from outward acts, church memberships, formal relationships or positions. A baptism on paper means nothing without a genuine desire to love our neighbor.

Both men break down physically because they are unable to reconcile their innermost being with the truths they observe around them. Such selfishness has far-reaching consequences not just for them, but for their community.

For a very short 172 pages, Endo - as usual - leaves this reader pondering life choices. And while I wish this book had been cheerier, that would have lessened its ending's impact.

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Book Review: TOMB OF SAND by Geetanjali Shree (translated by Daisy Rockwell)

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Author Geetanjali Shree wrote the best possible one-liner for the heart of the story herself: "An octogenarian lady from Delhi crosses the border on foot without a visa in search of an old lover." But this is only one of several threads in this unforgettable tribute to motherhood, family, nationhood, and the power of story and literature.

When a book written by a not-s0-well-known author from a not-so-well-known publishing house wins the International Booker Prize, inquiring minds will of course want to read it! (By the way, I'm so happy at having discovered Tilted Axis Press! I foresee a good deal of my future salary going into obtaining their remarkable titles! They should be more famous!)

I wasn't expecting TOMB OF SAND to be 735 pages long, but don't let its length put you off! It didn't FEEL like 700+ pages, which is a testament to the author's skill. The language (apart from the unfamiliar Hindu terms) is simple and lyrical, with word play and literary techniques that, incredibly, did not detract from the narrative pace. What a difficult thing to do!

The four star rating is not a judgment on the book's merits, but more on the limitations of this Filipino reader: with all the Hindu cultural and historical references inside, I must confess it took 200 pages of getting used to, with the remaining 500 pages easy going once I had gotten my literary bearings. Geetanjali Shree's prose, translated by Daisy Rockwell, is efficient and MOVING in both its meanings for speed and impact. I was tearing through pages, NEEDING to know what happened next. Thank goodness for Google (although some parts were too exciting that I simply couldn't be bothered putting the book down to input characters hurriedly on my phone, and just forged ahead. Context clues rock!).

I must tell of a clever literary trick the author pulled. She starts with a bang ("There were two women and one death,") but then adds 200 pages of world building that made the reader focus on so much noise of shallow every-day-living going on in the story (and almost made me put down the book out of boredom), when BAM! AN INCIDENT occurs that jerks us back into the true heart of the tale: the eighty-year-old lady whose name I shall not reveal because I do not wish to spoil the story, hehe). "See how easy it is to forget about a widow if she does nothing but sleep off her depression?" Shree said to this shocked reader, making me an accomplice to the heroine's almost-undoing.

I was weeping by then, deeply moved by scenes in pages that my family recently enacted only a few months ago. I kept thinking of the Filipino saying "The mother is the light of the home," because of the many times the author wrote of the heroine being like the Sun, or having sunlight hit her in strange and beautiful ways. Some of the most touching scenes where the ones showing how her adult children constantly sought for their mother's smile, or how they lit up upon seeing hers. How they cared for their mother in her dotage, and how they were sucked up in her rebirth when she sought to go on her quest.

This book is about borders ("What is a border? It's something that surrounds an existence, it is a person's perimeter... however, a border is not created to be removed. It is meant to illuminate both sides... a border is a horizon where two worlds meet and embrace.") and transcending them. Shree didn't just mean the Partition of Hindustan and Pakistan, but anything that was divided from others because of religion or gender.

Speaking of the borders between genders, this was also the first time I learned about the hijra in India (persons of the third gender), and how cruel their countrymen are towards them, despite their existence in the culture since antiquity.

This book is a universal appeal for forgiveness and understanding, warning about the perils of differentiation: "Proclaiming divisions has become a celebration for some. A jubilee of hatred. The joy of rifts."

Shree's book is a worthy prize winner, indeed. And has left this reader thirsty for more works that highlight stories that might not be highlighted by social media, but are as important and rich as their Western counterparts (if not more!). Shree's choice to write this in Hindi, despite being fluent in English, is a testament to her dedication.

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Book Review: PLAY IT AGAIN - AN AMATEUR AGAINST THE IMPOSSIBLE by Alan Brusbridger

Play It Again: An Amateur Against The Impossible by Alan Rusbridger
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"The masterpieces of music are kept alive, not at the theatres and concert-halls, but at the pianofortes of lovers of music."

I made time to finish this book after what was two of the busiest weeks of my life!!

The start of every school year is always both a teacher's most happy and stressful time, with our deep joy at seeing the children balanced out by a heavier-than-usual work load. This historic year, with our school embarking on the hybrid method of teaching students both online and in campus AT THE SAME TIME, proved to be no different from previous years in this respect. Pile on some unexpected mini crises (professionally AND personally), and it's no wonder a co-teacher told me yesterday: "You look stressed." HAHAHAHA.

But how is my pandemic work experience different from that of any other adult in 2022?

Alan Rusbridger, former editor of THE GUARDIAN, was certainly no stranger to stress. His descriptions of 14-17 hour workdays, with 6 hours of the weekend spent just getting up to speed before the start of the next week, seemed familiar. But my own work woes seemed pathetically small compared to his, especially in 2010 when Rusbridger was juggling rescuing a kidnapped reporter from Libya during the Arab Spring, meeting the Royal Family at awards ceremonies, being summoned by Assange at the height of both the WikiLeaks and the NEWS OF THE WORLD hacking controversy... while squeezing in 20 minutes of piano a day and meeting up to four piano teachers for lessons. You see, Rusbridger had determined to play Chopin's (in)famous Ballade No. 1 in front of an audience within a year (it took him 16 months). This book is basically a diary-like account of his daily struggles to meet work obligations (championing the rights of democracy, ethics, and freedom of the press) with piano lessons, interviews with the likes of Daniel Barenboim and Condoleeza Rice, and the obligations of a father and a husband. It ends with a lovely reproduction of the Ballade's score, with annotations and commentary, so anyone with half a mind to try their hand at the Chopin piece could learn!

There is something in the book for everyone. Serious pianists and piano-teachers will appreciate the detailed and exhaustive accounts from his four piano teachers and pianists whom he took masterclasses with. Working adults will be inspired with his "pressure valve release" of 20 minutes of re-wiring his brain at the piano, something that I now see as essential and not a luxury in order to do one's job well, for much longer.

One of the things I loved best about the book was seeing detailed daily schedules on how to parcel out the 24 hours we all have, for maximum efficiency. It involves planning out how you'll spend every 15 minute chunk of time. I just spent one and half of those chunks typing out this review, which beats mindless scrolling through social media! :) And this book has inspired me to make time for music-making, something which I've done very little of these past few years.

I was also inspired by the lovely descriptions in the book of Hausmusik, which was always the part I loved best about my time as a music major! The lovely intimacy of making music with friends, not for profit, but for sheer pleasure... there's simply no equivalent for that kind of joy.

When the current Covid surge subsides, would anyone be up for some art song, Broadway, and kundiman jamming in the Southern part of Metro Manila? * wink wink * Let me know!!

In the meantime, I'm off to do more work. And hopefully squeeze in some piano-playing afterwards...not because I want to. But because I NEED to. It is in music that I found my deepest joy, before. And as this book reminds me, it is never too late, one is never too busy, to PLAY IT AGAIN. (Or in my case, to sing it again.)

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