“tabi tabi po!”
Been sitting at the screen awhile now. Sometimes I get up, circle the room, go downstairs, open the fridge, look, close the fridge. I even left the house. But generally I’ve been coming back to the screen. Resolving to face the ______ page like a man.
I don’t know how it is for other people, but my process is a long process of waiting. Insane waiting. It’s probably not the most productive, but I manage to work through it.
So like I’m sitting in a waiting room for something not all that great to happen, I gotta distract myself. My dentist used to have fish and a Bi-way connected to it. Just thought I’d bring that up.
I’m pretty excited about my distraction these days. It’s a novel called Ilustrado by a Filipino authour named Miguel Syjuco. I knew of it before I picked it up, I even met the guy at a reading. So the guy and his novel are the darlings of the literary world at this moment.
He’s probably in Europe right now, banging a Parisian waitress in between interviews at various bistros. Fuck knows? I was pretty jealous and held off from reading the book for a quite a bit. But then it was just sitting there.
I’m not a literary type. I like writing. I like reading. But in general, I don’t get or hate the people who do it. Fuckin smarty-pants’ most of them. Which is still what I think of the guy. Still, I’ve been having trouble putting his book down.
This is not a review. Or a critique. Fuck I know about that? But it’s good. So good, I felt compelled to post an excerpt before I’ve even gotten through the book.
And fuck it, I’m proud. I’m proud we kinda came from the same place (he lives in Montreal now).
For Filipinos kids who used to hear Dwende stories when they were kids. Or anyone else who believes in mythical creatures. Here it is:
Dulcé and Jacob looked behind them as they sprinted. “I told you,” Jacob said huffing and puffing, “They’re going to eat us alive! We should’ve only gone there while it was still light. We should’ve listened to old Gardener.”
At the end of the fence, they crouched down and hid. In the alley, in the full moon’s blue cast, the dwendes came skipping along. Six of them. Their eyes glowed like insane fireflies, and their flowing silver beards fluttered like smoke. They stopped and sniffed the air. They were tiny, cute even, but possessed an air of vicious territoriality.
“We can’t go home,” Dulcé whispered, “they’ll find out where we live. They’ll hurt my family.”
“I told you,” was all Jacob could reply. “I told you. We shouldn’t have disturbed their tree. I told you.”
Dulcé had a sudden idea. “Follow me,” she whispered, before jumping into the alley, in full view of the dwendes. Jacob crouched, shocked, frozen. He was used to following Dulcé’s craziness, but this was too much. The dwendes smiled, clapped their hands happily, bared their razor-sharp teeth, and skipped forward at full speed toward the kids. “Come on!” Dulcé said, pulling Jacob by the shirt. The two ran toward Dulce’s backyard, their breaths and hearts and the cracking of the underbrush the only things they could hear.
-from QC Nights, Book Two of Crispin Salvador’s Kaputol trilogy
SO YEAH . . . still banging out the book. You gotta read it to get why there’s a Dwende story in a novel called Ilustrado and why the excerpt is written by another writer. It’s the style. It’s this Po-Mo who-what? that makes my head spin trying to talk about it. Just go read it.
-mlv
