1. Grand Prize winner of the Centennial Literary Prize, Jun Cruz Reyes's Etsa-puwera is a take on the history of marginalization, and the role of writing in such a history and in the reclamation of one's pasts. Our narrator is Ebong, whose ancestry he traced with the help of his Lola Sion's midday stories, where impossible things could happen, and his father Ruben's intermittent sharing of knowledge as historian, mostly disguised as legends or children's stories for adults. Ebong had a disclaimer early on: his was a patched-up version. How do we trust his narratives, then? Or what kind of truth do we look for when we read a novel that has claims to history?

In most cases, the stories are written after a series of overlapped voices. In one instance we were told that a section was based on an official document written by Padre Francisco, which was now interpreted by Ruben, then retold by Ebong, and finally was, of course, only part of Jun Cruz Reyes's design. Many times would Rebo assume the voice of his own characters in order to get a sense of their inner realities. I was not often convinced, but the ambivalence of his voice was, as mentioned, part of the ploy.

2. First in Ebong's ancestral lineage was Carrayyo of Cordillera, everything that one looks for in an epic hero, except that he did not have his luck in wooing the women of his tribe. Apo Ekkon, the god of the hunters and forest's wilds, intervened by sending him Oysang, a deer transformed into a beautiful maiden, to be his wife. They had three children before our hunter learned of the truth. The people made fun of Oysang's difference, and she had to leave her family and went back to being a deer because of this.

Carrayyo's youngest was also named Oysang, because she inherited the beauty of her mother. But she was as unlucky as her father in love because men shied away from her, and treated her like a "beautiful orchid at the top of a cliff," which no one would dare to pluck. After a tribal war between her Changyasan and the newly-founded Mafissoray, Oysang crossed paths with Padre Francisco de San Esteban or Apo Kiko, and was christened as Rosa. She was then made to live with the priest in the convent, to serve him and his sexual desires. But before gossip was spread about their true relationship, Rosa was given for adoption to old couple Enyong and Bartola.

Rosa had Teban as a playmate until their games went from catching one another in the waters into Teban touching her privates. This went on further until she got pregnant and they were forced to get married. Their immaturity and incompatibility made them decide to eventually go separate ways; their child also failed to survive. Teban went on to serve the revolution before he ultimately lost his ways and changed allegiances as often as he misunderstood what it was he was fighting for and against.

The difficulties of the war against the Americans made Rosa's adoptive parents give her to the opportunist Chinese Paulino Heneral Tan-yan, one of the first few who read Rizal's novels in Spanish, whose only claim to heroism was a rank given to him by equally opportunist Aguinaldo, to serve as his sex slave. The product of these trysts was Sion, Ebong's grandmother, even if Ruben was really Rosa's grandson to another child, the mute Ando, of a different father--the revolutionary leader Dionisio Balinghasay, more known as Papa Dune.

3. Ebong, from his real name Rebolusyon, was born in the mountains. From the various Filipino ethnoepics to Balagtas' Florante at Laura to Rizal's Noli Me Tangere to Macario Pineda's Ang Ginto sa Makiling, the mountains and forests had been sanctuary to the revolution. Reyes recognized this: "Lagi't laging ang kagubatan ang sanktwaryo sa panahon ng ligalig, noon hanggang ngayon at sa mahaba pang panahon. Doo'y may bisa pa ang dasal nila sa kanilang mga anito." Reyes, despite the plurality of voices in his novel, was not covert with his political position and sympathies.

4. The novel ends with the deaths of Sion, Ruben and Boybi, Ebong's friend--perhaps as foil to what Rebo could have been or could be; Sion decided to die believing she was no longer made for the fast changes in the present world--and the last two were both killed for political reasons. Ebong decided that the stories must end before his story, his own story, should begin. And he left us with a question: What do you think should we do now? Novel-reading demands action as a consequence.

1. Where does the essence of an entire century lie? Within many everyday events, replied Peter Høeg's narrator in The History of Danish Dreams, whose identity was revealed in the last two pages of the novel, when I no longer cared about his relationship with the main characters of his stories. Because this was an attempt to write a history, the history, of a nation's dreams (both an unusual and interesting subject to historicize), time is necessarily problematized even from the start. If history is embedded in time, time must exist for history to materialize; if time was an invention, it must be something that people can get rid of, not unlike their own history.

But our narrator would reveal: "I, too, have a dream of living in a chaotic universe where hours and minutes have no place... I, too, feel like trying to run from time, but it catches up with us all, even with me." This narrator, all throughout the narrative, would equate his individual longings and dreams to that of a collective, of the whole Danish dreams, and the only justification is that "he was born to the sensitivity and confusion of this century."

2. The triumphant melancholy of the chosen. This becomes the predicament of individuals whose lives were at the center of a developing narrative. Here we get to know Carl Laurids and Amelie Teander and their son Carsten, and Anna Bak and Adonis Jensen and their daughter Maria; Maria and Carsten would of course meet, get married, and have their own children. These people determined which among "many everyday events" would have significance, what dreams would they allow to surface: the dream of the nouveau riche "of having a total, one hundred percent firm grip on time," and yet the pretensions of middle-class lives that only burglars and thieves, like Adonis' father Ramses, could observe in the silence and intimacy of their burglary; and the dream of the Village, alongside the "idea of the waiting city [that] is not just an image... [but] also a historical fact." Space and class clearly predominate the issues of a century's longings.

These dreams then become a parody of archetypes, of people that would populate Danish narratives again and again in the past--lost children, charming soldiers, ambitious men, abandoned wives, insubordinate students, teen rebels, disagreeable mothers-in-law. In their soap opera world was the "art of reticence," and in the narrator's part, this reticence if fulfilled in the ultimate denial of form: "All things considered, we should all be grateful that this is not a novel." And the extent of this denial was in the desire, in the end, for the arrival of a new media, since "at this point in time, in Denmark, so many dreams are making themselves heard that it may no longer be possible to present them through the two-dimensional medium of paper." The future of the novel as we know it is challenged in an account that does not want to be called a novel.

3. Johannes V. Jensen, a Danish Nobel Prize for Literature winner in 1944, was a peripheral presence in the novel, and whenever he appeared, Høeg was clearly not sympathetic, especially for "all those trashy novels he had written in his youth [that] had given plenty of practice in the study of human nature, helped by a handful of crude theories."

But the sarcasm was not the same whenever Høeg would present the reading of novels in general as something that could swell one's "fantasy even further," or as just one in a series of thoughts that was preceded by the fantasy of killing someone and then, an imagined declaration of love. Or when Carsten was reading gilt-edged Danish literature, "in which grownup men describe the same loneliness as that which surrounds him." Or when Carsten was warned by his boss about James Joyce's Ulysess, which for the the former was "one long, scandalous piece of verbal diarrhea," even if he had never actually read it.

1. The first volume of a novel-in-three-parts, Your Face Tomorrow, 1: Fever and Spear is Javier Marias' meditations on the dangers of telling someone something; that even if words as creations are creative, they have a destructive potential that could lead to a person's death, or even a whole nation's downfall. The paradox, of course, is that we are being told not to "tell anyone anything or give information or pass on stories." What are the dangers then that our narrator, Jacques Deza, had to face by this betrayal of his very own warning?

This is then a novel about how much people keep, even to themselves. It is about masks, and lies, and imaginings, that sometimes become truths in order for people to get the things they wanted, or believed they wanted. For in this world even our wants could be made-up. But: "the hardest part about fictions is not creating, but maintaining them, because, left to their own devices, they tend to fall apart." And so the hardness of politics and the ambivalence of literature would get mixed-up. Deza might be reading a book on history and yet fictive characters would populate his allusions. We thought we were reading a novel and then we would be presented with pictures and posters and facsimile of documents that might exist in reality.

2. This is also, naturally, about language, what it could and could not say, the language as fountains of our truths and our lies. This is about what one language finds difficult to say from another language--concepts, ideas, experiences. Deza, a Spanish from Madrid who now lives in London, recognizes how his own shifts in language--between Spanish & English--also trigger recognitions of what is home. Even if he could use both languages fluently (like many other bilinguals), only one of them could he really call his own. People may be able to use several languages, but they can only ever own one.

3. Time here moves slowly (unlike in detective or mystery novels, "to which Wheeler, like all people of a speculative or philosophical bent, was quietly addicted," or in an adventure novel such as Fleming's From Russia with Love, which was quoted heavily in this novel), because people are immersed in thinking and talking, mostly about what happened during the war--a past that Deza didn't share with his mentor Wheeler--and how people like Deza, the ones prescient, were recruited to help assess people, to understand what people would be capable of doing, to know what their face tomorrow would be, because "perhaps the future has more influence and imposes more obligations on us than the past, the unknown more than the already known." Marias here critiques how easily we could pass judgment on people and yet how difficult it is for us to understand ourselves. And so persecutions happened, and continue to happen, both in the left and in the government, and in our very own conflicted lives.

1. Shawarma Nights is the first of three sections in Vincent Jan Cruz Rubio's Paspas: Maiikling Kuwento, published posthumously by his family and friends. The six interconnected stories in this section felt like reading a novel--a novella, at least--and an eventual visit to VJ's blog revealed that they were actually intended as chapters of a novel, scheduled for publication in July 2006. (I am not aware of what happened, but I can understand that a lot of complications can happen between the writing of a book and its hoped-for publication.)

2. The epigraph, where the book's title was taken, was also from his blog: "Paspas tayo kung umibig. Minsan nasusugatan, pero naghihilom din. Paspas tayo kung huminga. Minsan naghahabol, pero napapawi rin. Paspas tayo kung mabuhay. Minsan nadarapa, pero bumabangon din. Tayo ay mga eksistensya ng kapaspasan--mga alipin sa mundo ng pagmamadali, hindi pananatili." And what did the ancients tell us about all this? My favorite of all Filipino proverbs: "Ang lumakad nang matulin, kung matinik ay malalim." Paspas. To live, and then to leave in a hurry, just like the woman who jumped off the crossing--central to the narrative, peripheral to the lives that revolve around music, sex, desires--the contents and discontents of our ids, the "hydrography" of our being--except, perhaps, for Jesus, the blind raconteur in "20/20," who harbored feelings toward the woman.

3. Of course I couldn't totally separate the writer from the text: the writer becomes text, is text, for VJ is--was--also a friend, a co-fellow in a national writers' workshop, a very promising contemporary, he who died ahead of us, was killed, and did not really decide to die, unlike Emma, the woman in his novella, he whose life was probably much like the plural lives in his stories that are trying to survive each day, with the illusion of a future--for what else would keep them from jumping off another bridge?