1. The Savage Detectives may be considered as Roberto Bolaño’s first “real combat,” a phrase he used in 2666 to refer to a “great, imperfect, torrential work.” It is perhaps shorter than the later novel but it certainly overwhelms in its attempt to expose quite literally an aspect of Bakhtin’s heteroglossia. “The Savage Detectives” is the mid-section collection of stories recounted by different people across continents, from Mexico to US to Europe to Africa, and across decades, from 1976 to 1996; these narratives are trapped in between two parts of Juan García Madero’s diary entries, written from November to December 1975 (“Mexicans Lost in Mexico”), and January to February 1976 (“The Sonora Desert”).

2. Despite some comic moments, I believe that this is a sad, sad novel. I would have argued that sadness might be the main temperament of most great works, even those that overtly intend to make us laugh (remember Don Quixote, and Rabelais, as recognized by Bakhtin and Kundera in their studies of the novel, although I’ve yet to read Gangantua and Pantagruel)—for what’s more sad than having to read a book just so that we can have a really good laugh—but I’d rather distinguish the sadness that’s peculiar to this work, in order to avoid the sad trap of hasty generalizations.

This is the story of bohemians Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, as narrated by almost all of the people they got to know, some more intimate than others, with all their limitations and biases, from the time when Belano and Lima were very active as probably the remaining champions of visceral realism, a literary movement supposedly founded by one Cesarea Tinajero, whose disappearance led the two ardent poets in search of her. Did they get to find her? Yes. (There, I just spoiled your own reading of the novel. Or maybe not. Finding Tinajero was probably the most truthful, and because of it, heartbreaking, realizations in the novel, when Garcia Madero, in his diary, observed that “there was nothing poetic about her. She looked like a rock or an elephant.”) But what happened after they found her, we would realize in the end, was most likely what propelled Belano and Lima to just go away, and leave even their desire to be poets behind.

3. When Jacobo Urenda, a journalist, asked Belano why he wanted to die before, when they first met in Africa, Belano said that “he had lost something and he wanted to die, that was all. Then [Urenda] heard Belano laugh and [he] imagined that [Belano] was laughing about what he’d lost, his great loss, laughing at himself and other things, things [Urenda] knew nothing about and didn’t want to know anything about.” Was it writing, poetry, that he felt he lost? This is ultimately a story of two failed writers, failures in the sense that they were thrown by fate far away from writing. They could have been great writers, but how can we know now? (Speculation has its own well of grief: what is it for, especially when things are already over and done with?) In this sense, The Savage Detectives is in a way Bolaño’s response to Kundera’s Life Is Elsewhere. When two promising poets had to live lives that did not allow them to write, was it really a waste? Or was it a blessing to this world that no longer understands poetry?

1. Thanks to an ebay.ph bid I made more than a year ago, I was very lucky to avail a first edition copy of Macario Pineda’s classic Ang Ginto sa Makiling, his second novel published in Aliwan, one of the major publications for Tagalog novels after the war. Pineda began writing in English but shifted to Tagalog during the war. He died at the young age of 38, leaving behind six published novels that ensured his place in Philippine literary history. Ginto is arguably the most-studied of Pineda’s longer works. However, most of these studies focused on the poetics and aesthetic compositions of the work. In a slightly different and longer version of this essay, I proposed a political context reading of Pineda’s fantasy as expressed in the novel.

2. Rizal was clearly one of Pineda’s major influences, especially when the latter mentioned that Sisa and Crispin were among those worthy to live in Mount Makiling. They were both victims of the Spanish colonial system who had to die in Rizal’s Noli me Tangere, as if treating them as lunatic and thief, respectively, were not enough injury. Rizal was also the first to retell the story of Mariang Makiling, published in an issue of La Solidaridad, with the intent to address the unjust acquisition of lands by friars that affected his own family in Calamba. It was apparent that Pineda’s use of folklore went beyond “surface mining,” for it recognizes the political implications in the nation’s collective unconscious of the images he used.

3. It is necessary to focus on Pineda’s use of fantasy, because this had been the very strategy of most of our epics, legends and folk stories that was not mined by later social realist novels. Of course, this seemed not entirely divorced from the marvelous realism that Latin American writers used to assess critically both the effects of colonialism and neocolonialism. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, when he received the Nobel in 1982, argued however that seeing their stories as magical only come from without, and that “[t]he interpretation of our reality through patterns not our own, serves only to make us ever more unknown, ever less free, ever more solitary.” In our case, it is necessary to see that in the folk’s consciousness, Makiling and many other mountains in the Philippines are viewed as sacred centers of an emergent nation.

Unlike in our corridos such as Ibong Adarna where there was a clear antagonism between majica blanca and majica negra, there was only one kind of enchantment in Ginto: the one found in Makiling. Notice that the novel’s present (1947) was a time where the characters’ relationship with that kind of magic varied (not unlike the our present): there were those who had faith in it, like the reporter who also act as narrator; there were those who laughed at it, like Bato who made fun of Esteban Reyes’s letter that insinuated that Mariang Makiling could be the reason for the disappearance of an old woman in Bulacan; and there were also those who just did not care, like Danding Del Mundo who was editor of the Ramon Roces publications. It is also important to acknowledge Manila here as the site of this ambivalence, in the face of what it could and could not fully comprehend and illuminate. And from there, the publications became a site of discourse—where the fantastic and the real are equally mere subjects of writing: they were both just words that could be narrated, exposed and argued about.

1. Zadie Smith’s debut novel centers on postcoloniality as a predicament of people trying to make sense of contemporary lives in a formerly colonial center. We get to know the generations of Iqbals, Joneses and Chalfens in mostly a psychological warfare that involves race, tradition, science and religion. In many precolonial tribes, as in a number of those found in the Philippines, people would either chew nganga to blacken their teeth, or ornament their teeth with gold. Their logic was simple: those white teeth made them not unlike animals, and getting rid of their whiteness could make them distinct from the beasts. This reinforces what humans are willing to do, with their body, first of all, to assert their humanity. But we learned early on that being human has its own price. Things that are never problematized by non-humans, like the moon and guns, continue to haunt us simply because we’re made homo sapiens: death, suicides, accidents, decisions.

In the beginning, the novel was a story of Samad Iqbal and Archie Jones, and the trauma that “missing the war” had caused them. They were there as soldiers, actually, but were somehow lost in the middle of it, in the war’s sheer immensity, that they did not know it was over until two weeks later. Later on, their ordeals were somewhat passed on to their children: Irie Jones, and the twins Magid & Millat Iqbal. Things got more complicated when they got mixed up with the Chalfen family, whose middle-class “more English than English” (they were actually originally from Ireland) ways of life stirred up, for better or worse, the already troubled young Jones and Iqbals.

2. In Smith’s novel, having the teeth white is almost similar to signing a death wish, for, as Mr. Hamilton recounted, during the war, the only way they could “identify the nigger [in the dark of the night] was by the whiteness of his teeth… and [he] died because of it.” But of course, advertising and mass media at present just can’t get enough of telling us the beauty of the white teeth; and why would they bother to tell us the number of people they brought to their deaths? Truly, white teeth is Smith’s trope to the way history changes, and the manner our values shift in relation to the amount of things we tend to remember and forget about the past. In one night of heated conversation, Samad, when Irie challenged him to test her knowledge of current events and history, had this only to say: “The gulf between books and experience is a lonely ocean.”

3. Smith used the end of the millenium brouhaha in her attempt to present the centuries-long dialogue and war (that at times, bloodier than we would have hoped for) between religions and the sciences, and how these two institutions determined our faith in mostly everything we would live and die for. But there was also the notion of the nation, the homeland that continuously haunts us. This was the reason why Samad sent Magid to Bangladesh, away from his twin brother. This was also at the back of Irie’s mind when she decided she wanted to visit Jamaica, for “no fictions, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs—this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into the language. And the particular magic of homeland, its particular spell over Irie, was that it sounded like a beginning. The beginningest of beginnings. Like the first morning of Eden and the day after the apocalypse. A blank page.”

1. A decade after the publication of Don Quixote, Cervantes would write the sequel to the madness of the knight of rueful countenance in resentment with Avellanedo, the impostor who wrote a second volume to Don Quixote that was published in 1614. Cervantes would attack the falsities in Avellanedo’s version by making Don Quixote aware of this “other” text, and by leading the knight away to contrary adventures. Later in the novel, however, Don Quixote, in his deathbed, after realizing his prior madness, would ask his executors to ask the author of that second part to his adventures “to forgive [him] for having been the innocent cause of his writing such a number of absurdities.” Cervantes, until the very end, did not leave us without his ironies in place. In many parts of the novel, Cervantes himself corrects some of the lapses in his first volume, and novelistically reasons that, they were, perhaps, “an oversight in the historian, or owing to the carelessness of the printer.”

Similar to the first volume, Cervantes began with a Preface addressing the reader, recognizing, in another of his ironic strains, that one of the devil’s “most effectual snares is to make a man believe that he has capacity to write a book.” We know that a number of novels after Don Quixote, even my first, would somehow deal with this illusion to write a literary masterpiece. In the Philippines, Rizal’s novels cast too large a shadow to further writer’s insecurities and uncertainties with their own projects and craft. I wonder how it would have affected Rizal’s El Filibusterismo if the book ostentatiously called Noli Me Tangere 2, written by one Roger P. Olivares, was published during his day.

2. Cervantes did not comment on the nature of sequels alone, but also on the conditions necessary for translation, and more often its impossibility, among other things, believing that “there is scarce a nation or language into which [the first volume] will not be translated.” The Wordsworth edition I read argues that, “Tobias Smollett's vigorous and lively translation brilliantly catches the feeling and tone of the Spanish original. It is a comic novelist’s homage to a comic novelist.” Truly, Smollett’s own annotations, especially whenever he would not literally translate Cervantes, further complicate the text.

3. Cervantes’s calisthenics with levels of textuality extends to this volume and perhaps even went beyond what the earlier volume could accomplish. Like the first, this is a story being narrated based on a history written by Cid Hamet Bengeli. However, this text becomes aware of the existence of the earlier history and of another volume supposedly following the first but that this text would contradict. Don Quixote therefore becomes a character of a novel where another Don Quixote’s exist, either as texts or as real life impersonators. But what if there were really a number of Don Quixote’s, and the limitations of the first Don Quixote’s adventures would not allow him to encounter other people that possess his name, although not necessarily his skin and attitude, as what Don Alvaro Tarfe related towards the end of the novel?

1. How could anyone study the history of the novel without considering Don Quixote? The first volume of this classic, considered by many to be one of the progenitors of the form, was published in 1605. I never thought that I’d enjoy reading the book; I even considered it as just one of those novels I had to read for its place in literary history. But as I was being drawn into the imaginative wit of the author, I was constantly astounded whenever I’d realize that I was holding a book imagined by someone more than four hundred years ago—an imagination that truly preempted all the current theorizing on postmodernity and narrativity. The book is conscious of itself as a text, and presents several layers of transference that effect changes in the contents and manner by which the stories are told (we are reading a work supposedly written by one Arab historian, Cid Hamet Bengeli)—not unlike the case of folk narratives in oral transmissions.

1. I finally got to tread a Bolaño landscape via his 2666, a novel published posthumously, and so incited questions of its truthfulness with regard to authorial intentions. When the author dies leaving some of his works unpublished, how do we determine if a particular work is already in its final form or not? (For one, the publishers did not follow Bolaño’s expressed intent for the five parts of 2666 to be published as individual books, believing that the author would not have wished such if he knew he was going to live longer to see the novel in print.) There’s no way, really, only that the death of the author makes it possible for us to secondguess, and sometimes even overread, his words, the way Kafka’s had been, for better or worse.

Nonetheless, with all the hype that is Bolaño (i.e. mostly positive reviews here and there, and some even bordering on hysteria), 2666 certainly did not fail. The book even somewhat argues for its length (almost a thousand pages!) and rawness, when the historian Amalfitano, who hears voices, was saddened by the fact that people “are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. … they want to watch the great masters to spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all…”

2. I have always argued that the great novels assume the role of a civilization’s archives, not just of the art and knowledge it has produced thus far—although they certainly contain the names and works that they thought matter, just like a bibliography of sources, although mentioned in ways more creative than merely a list (the manner in which most critical and academic works go about it)—but also an archives of the civilization’s guilt and terror, humiliation and defeat, and man’s attempts to make sense of his conflicted emotions amidst them all. Thus the two backdrops that would interrogate the characters of people within the novel: the second world war, and the disturbing serial killings of women in the US-Mexican border. The town of Santa Teresa served as the fulcrum that holds the five narratives together. I would not want to spoil your own reading and disclose how Bolaño tried to tie everything in the end, but his mastery of storytelling would keep the readers from realizing that there are even things that need to be tied up at all until you’re very close to the act.

3. This is also a writer’s book, ultimately, not just because one of the central characters, Benno von Archimboldi, is a writer, but because it problematizes man’s relationship with writing, with the book. The history of writing, it argues, developed a peculiar affliction among writers: the “fear of being no good,” especially because there is “no such thing as a minor work,” and there are only masterpieces, and every “writer” who does not come up with a masterpiece is forever a plagiarist, although sanctioned by our cultures that, sadly, find comfort in repetition.

1. Gerilya is Norman Wilwayco’s second novel and, like his first, a winner of the Palanca. The novel is yet to be published in print (and you can help in getting it published by pre-ording the book), but a pdf version is available for download. The novel has a clear sympathy for the movement, especially when the narrator acknowledged that the movement indeed committed a lot of mistakes in the past, but that it also continuously tried to correct itself. The novel is a story of giving names to the most often unknown masses, for in most cases, they were the ones who would save the movement in its various crises. In face of deep corruption by many politicians of what the masses really amount to, the novel breathes lives to these people in the margins, in the villages where true revolutions take place, where “the history of national-democratic revolution is currently being written."

2. In the novel, we get to know Tony & Ala, who both came from Manila, and started out as activists before they went up the mountains to become Ka Poli and Ka Alma. The chapters alternate between a first person narration by Tony and Ala’s third person point of view. If Wilwayco’s first novel presents a very individualistic response to systemic violence, here he confronted the possibility and difficulty of collective struggle. Almost in every chapter, we're presented with different people, precisely because they were constantly in the move, they could not just stay in one place. It shows us the plurality of those who are involved, that the people’s movement is really massive. Because of their stories, we get to understand the complications in the idealization and frustation of the masses: they have different fears and sufferings, joys and hopes.

3. Wilwayco seemed to have mastered the depiction of an antihero. Tony had two main addictions here: marjuana and invectives. He acknowledged that to use marijuana/chongki/doobie/weed/ganja/joint/damo was bourgeois, and so he would hide it from his comrades, and would use it mostly only when he’s shitting. His curses on the other hand was his reflexive reactions to bourgeois tendencies of the people he worked with, like Archie who would always find ways to avoid some tasks (“Putanginang-selfish-petty-burgeosie-kupaloids-motherfucker. Tanginang kupal at kalahati, puro kawag, walang bayag”). Almost everything that the civilization would fear to hear—rude, obscene, bold, truthful—were here in the novel.

4. In the end, we would realize that everything was just memories being forgotten yet painfully remembered. The narrative had three time frames, not unlike the usual divisions of time we would like to give it: the past (when Ala and Tony were in the mountains), the present (when the two of them were deciding to go separate ways), and the future (when Ala will again return to the movement, while Tony would live his life anew in a faraway province). For time guarantees that only separation is possible in this life, in one way or another.

1. Norman Wilwayco’s first novel and winner of the Palanca Award, Kung Paano Ko Inayos ang Buhok Ko Matapos ang Mahaba-haba Ring Paglalakbay, began as a short fiction of the same title, which was included in the Aklat Likhaan ng Tula at Maikling Kuwento 1998 and also awarded the Palanca for the short story. In the novel, place was used to establish time—or man’s remoteness to memory. Tony De Guzman went to Baguio in the beginning of the narrative in order to establish perspective in his narration. After all, it is the sense of story that sets order in the most complicated lives. In the end, Tony would also leave Baguio to live in Quezon and then go to Banahaw so that he could find other views, both literally and figuratively. Similar to what Rilke asks of us in one of his poems, Tony understood that he must change his life; and it was a total change, for, as readers, we no longer had access to that life.

2. In other spaces and time, Tony was viewed by the points-of-view that were his and not his. We saw Tony working to fetch water for the people of Tondo where he grew up; he also sold balut at night. Then we saw Tony as a scholar in UP, sponsored by some politician. Then there was Tony who served as manager of an IT Department in an insurance company. Despite changes of locations and identities, some things remained constant in Tony: his being addict, his intense libido, the contrast between his thoughts and what he’d actually say, and Karla. His character incites self-doubts among readers because Tony admits of things we would not easily acknowledge in ourselves—the potential in our person that was repressed by civilization: violent and obscene.

The ensemble of characters was as memorable as Tony’s: his mother who dreamt of being an actress but ended up being a laundrywoman; his father who would earn money by escorting old women, gays, and women in solitude, but would turn out to be not his real father; his younger brother who was pushed to prostitution by their neighbor Domeng; Almang Paybsiks, Sgt. Pepper and his junior, Naty, Mutya, Pablong Shoeshine, and Elmer and his crazed herd. In UP, there was Steve, his American classmate who would do nothing but criticize the Philippines; and also Roman, who had been studying in UP for ten years, a drug pusher, “a symbol of a lost society,” from whom Tony saw the extent of the “progress that was achieved by humanity.” In his office, we would get to know Jeffrey Dali and his secretary, Tess. In Baguio, there was Sarge.

Movement in space is sometimes an illusion in order for someone to tell himself that he was able to let go of the past, that he was freed of the past. The past remains as memory in the present, wherever we may be, no matter how long our journey may seem to be. And so in the end, a total change of self remains merely a plan, an aspiration. I can fix my hair, as the title suggests, but I remain the same person, my hair remains the same.

Jose Y. Dalisay, Jr.

• Killing Time in a Warm Place (1993)
• Soledad's Sister (2008)

• Sa mga Suso ng Liwanag (2006)
  

• Para Kay B (O Kung Paano Dinevastate ng Pag-ibig ang 4 out of 5 sa Atin) (2008)

• Cubao 1980 (1992)

• Ang Ginto sa Makiling (1947)
  

• Paghuhunos (2001)
• Unang Ulan ng Mayo (2009)

• Batbat hi Udan (2009)
  

• Mondomanila: Kung Paano Ko Inayos ang Buhok Ko Matapos ang Mahaba-haba Ring Paglalakbay (2002)
• Gerilya (2008)

• Ang Sandali ng mga Mata (2006)