Saumensch and Saukerl

THE BOOK THIEF

Markus Zusak

How funny is it that the things we love the most are the ones we can't encapsulate in words? I think every language in the world has a term for lexical gaps between words and feelings. Nobody can avoid it though, it comes once in a while and that's exactly what I have for this book. Feelings--which one, I don't know. It was mostly a mixture of joy, sadness, hope, love, admiration etc etc. There are so many things I want to say about this book, about the characters of this book but I'm pretty sure I will not be able to articulate it very well. So, I've decided that I'm just going to be straight with everyone: I love it. Please, please, please read it. (But don't read it in the dark like I did because you are not dramatic like me. I wanted to read like Liesl did and so I read with my night light at 3 AM. It's very bad for your eyes and for your overall feeling throughout the day)

This is a lovely book and anybody who reads it is sure to love it. (Okay, that's a huge bias on my part but oh, how else can I sell this one special book?) I mean, I've been trying to write about for a whole month and I can't seem to get it right. It means so much to me in a big, big way and I am so afraid of messing it up for people who are yet to read it. It's a wonderful book about the power of words but it's also a book about love, death, and humanity. The plot is simple but very well-written, the sentences are so simple but powerful and many of them, the ones about relationships with people and life itself, are so spot-on, I wish I highlighted all of them. It has so many lessons, big and small and I'll be damned if I dissuade people from this book. I just love it so much and I hope one day, if you pick it up, you will too.

PS: My favorite part in the book is a little story called The Word Shaker. When I read it, I was just.. well, I was just.. can I just? Yes. Please. Read it.

"The BEST word shakers were the ones who understood the true power of words. They were the ones who could climb the highest. One such word shaker was a small, skinny girl. She was renowned as the best word shaker of her region because she knew how powerless a person could be WITHOUT words.

That's why she could climb higher than anyone else. She had desire. She was hungry for them."

When the Elephants Dance

"Papa explains the war like this: ‘When the elephants dance, the chickens must be careful.' The great beasts, as they circle one another, shaking the trees and trumpeting loudly, are the Amerikanos and the Japanese as they fight. And our Philippine Islands? We are the small chickens. I think of baby chicks I can hold in the palm of my hand, flapping wings that are not yet grown, and I am frightened"

The Javs of the East gave me this book as a gift on my 20th birthday. It's a wonderful book, really, and I wish I spent more time writing down my thoughts while I read it. It's that great. I just wish another great Filipiniana book rolls my way soon. I have to admit that I don't look for them (or at them) that much. Anyway, enough of my self-absorption, let's get on with the book!

Let me explain the title first. 'When elephants dance, the chickens must be careful' is a geo-political metaphor about the World War II. The elephants are the Japanese and the Americans, of course, with all their bombing and fighting. Great countries. Powerful ones. We, the Filipinos, are the chickens who are caught in the middle. We can either choose to get out of the way or get crushed. A small price to pay. A casualty of war. I found the title very moving in itself and if it was any indication of how the book will pan out later on, I braced myself for a wonderful ride. I was right.

When the Elephants Dance is the story of the Karangalan family and the rest of their neighbors during the war. We meet three narrators in the story, Alejandro Karangalan, a guerilla leader named Domingo Matapang and my favorite, Isabelle--Alejandro's older sister. As the fighting and the interrogating continues, the Karangalan family and their neighbors decide to hide in a cellar to be able to survive. This is exactly what I love about the book, its story centers around the struggle to survive during an extraordinary time where the very concept of hope seemed so bleak. And yet hope they had and fight they did to surpass very trying times amidst a vicious war.

Inside the cellar, the Karangalans and their neighbors exchange stories of Filipino myth, superstitions, fables, legends to pass time, spark hope, build courage and teach values. They are spellbound by ghosts, witches, people worth looking up to and even by simple anecdotes from somebody's childhood. I loved all of it. As a child who was kept awake at night by ghost stories swapped with cousins, I adored it all. My favorites, however, were the church that sank to the ground and the story of the fisherman and the bone. You'll just have to read the book to find out what they're all about.

I promise not to spoil the book for everyone so let me just tell you something I found so brilliant. Aside from giving us a glimpse into the Filipino culture through the stories the Karangalans and their neighbors tell, the book also makes us feel the uncertainty, the fear, the injustice and the gravity of the war that was taking place during that time. It is so easy to lose the premise of the book amidst the many beautiful stories of Filipino myth and legend but I never felt disconnected to the bombings, the bloodshed and the treacherous nature of everything--people, places, politics during that time. Truth be told, this novel was a pleasant surprise in that aspect. It came and went like a silent storm. It was powerful but not in an explosive way, it was powerful because the prose is just as great as its story--a generous gift that kept on giving and giving. It was amazing and thrilling and well, it was many other adjectives I have not used in a Filipiniana book for a very long time.

To say that I was floored would be a grave understatement. I wasn't just floored, I was very proud of how colorful our history is and how, underneath the maniacal influence of Western culture, we have stories and values that we can still uphold and call our own. This was a very good read and a very special one, too.

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¹When the Elephants Dance by Tess Uriza Holthe

Jasmin Field and Empress Orchid

More on books! I finished reading these a few weeks ago but laziness got in the way of writing about them. Pride, Prejudice and Jasmin Field is yet another author's take on Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice, except this time it's set in contemporary London, it's about Jasmin Field who got the starring role (of Lizzy Bennet, no less) in a one-night only play, directed by this hot shot actor/director who's so full of pomp and pride, he can give Darcy a run for his money, blah...blah...blah...let me drown you with my commas. Nothing you can't see or read in Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary but as someone who cannot get over Fitzwilliam Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet, I bit into it and read it from cover to cover. Will I recommend this book for someone else's perusal? Sure, if you can find it. If you can't, don't worry. You don't lose much.

Empress Orchid, on the other hand, was a delectable book. It took me quite a while before I got on with the plot. Empress Orchid is a (let me clarify my use of the article a, a because this isn't THE story of Ci Xi but a sort of half-fiction, half-biography thing) story of Ci Xi, the last Empress of China. It's about a concubine who later became a regent, about a mother who had to save not only herself but her son, a girl who had to play the game in order to survive. I like the fact that Tzu Hsi (Ci Xi's name in the book) isn't a submissive heroine. She's a fighter from the start, an intelligent one at that. Although the book started out and finished strong, it was a challenge to read because of all the East Asian jargon. I had to Google most of them except for palanquin, which I bet you'll look up right about now (or not since my vocabulary is weaker than most, admittedly). The book gets better later on and I love, love, love the cunning, tension (both political and sexual), customs and restraint in this book. I love the elaborate tradition, excessive wealth and esoteric nature practiced in the Forbidden City. I also love the intense power struggle, the superstition and the devotion of every character in this book (whether to their masters, to religion, to power, to their child etc etc). Those who love Asian Studies and Anthropology, in general, will like this book. I wish I could say more about its authenticity but my knowledge during Ci Xi and Pu Yin's time is very limited, I cannot comment on how much of it is fact or fiction. One day, I might be able to but for now, I'll stick to liking this book and its author.

I've always liked Anchee Min. One of her novels, Becoming Madame Mao, is a recurring figure in my nightstand (assuming that I have one, which I don't) despite it being about a woman touted as The White Boned Demon in China. There's something so magnetic about her prose that it just draws me in. I used to think my attachment to Min's writings was because of my predilection for Asian women and literature but I can't be certain. What I do know is that Anchee Min has taken a fancy for giving antagonized Asian women voices of their own, as in Becoming Madame Mao (which is, obviously, a book about Madame Mao, the leader of the cultural revolution in China) and in Empress Orchid (a book about Ci Xi, who is also heavily antagonized during and after her reign in real life), and she did it pretty well.

One Day: Twenty Years, Two People

Em and Dex. Dex and Em. Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew have been keeping me company for a good two weeks and while I have read and loved other books in between finishing their story, I will write about them first. I will write about them just because the whole premise of our lives is that love is hard and it's a struggle to keep things together and not let it fall apart. I have to warn you, it isn't a love story with a happy ending. And I really like it that way. Now, this book might speak to someone else differently but to me, it is so spot-on in pointing out the struggles of lovers--of human fraility, of timing, of keeping love itself.

A lot can be said about this book's setting, which is catching up with two people every July 15th for twenty years. Smart, isn't it? I won't go around writing about that because I'm not smart enough to do so. I, however, can just go ahead and say that I loved the characters because I did. I do.

I love Dexter Mayhew despite his constant struggle to keep the people he loves in his life. The strain of doing so wears him, and the people around him, thin. He is flawed, completely flawed, but it is in this complexity that I find him charming and human. I love Emma Morley because while she isn't up-front pretty, she is intelligent and principled. I love how she struggled to find her footing at first but eventually became an accomplished woman. I love how she's so reflective and how she feels so strongly for many things that it's easy to misread her as angry and self-satisfied. I love her because she reminds me of myself, of my fears, of my worries, of the future I frequently think of (even if I should be focused on the rut I am currently in, a.k.a my ugly present). At 20, one of my biggest fears is waking up twenty years later as the person I hoped I would not be. Let me write the quote that I like the most:

"She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today's Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centered? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgemental, self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most."

I can write many things about Emma Morley but I won't do that. I would like for others to discover Em and Dex in their own way. The last thing I can say about this book (without spoiling it, I've been told the way I write about my books kind of ruin things for other people) is that I loved the characters' chemistry, the almost tangible connection they share with each other and with the reader. I love Suki Meadows, Tilly Killick, Alison Mayhew and even cold, collected, calculated Sylvie. Most of all, I loved Em and Dex and how right they were for each other, loving and hating one another at the same time. I love their partnership. While reading the book, I felt like I was watching two of my old friends' lives unravel before me. I knew, just like everybody else, that they were bound to get together somehow, if not a little bit late. I love Em and Dex, Dex and Em. I love the people that they were and the people they've become. I loved every July 15th, the twenty years in their life that I was able to see.

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PS: So much thanks to A for lending me this book. It was a good read. :)

We'll be old in a bit so let's make the most of it

Hello, it's been a while. I have a lot to say about the books I've been reading but first let me ease into a ~real-life related~ photo dump. Every Saturday, my friends and I (or The Crew! Hi, Cougar Town!) go out for some good 'ol feasting because life tends to wear us out by the end of the week. As I've said before, it is a way to re-charge whatever energy is left in our systems by the time weekend hits. It's also a way to re-group because if we are to vent, we should vent to long-time friends.

Our last escapade was two Saturdays ago. The break was a conscious effort on our part because to be power ladies (and a boss, because Carles is a guy) is to be financially smart. We can't indulge every Saturday so while we wait for our next "meeting", let me show you pictures of our last..uhm..escapade. We started with Lusso (GB 5, beside Balenciaga) and their really delicious foie gras burger. It's filling but it could be better. In what way, you ask? Well, for one, the foie gras could be at least five inches think and the burger reduced to a mere half-inch coating of the duck/goose liver. Now, that's a foie gras burger. ;) I think next time, I'll stick with foie gras croque monseiur. Then, it was sweetness overload for the three of us with wonderful macarons from Bizu and a selection of cakes (Carl's Amour, a Valrhona-orange chocolate concoction, A's Strawberry shortcake and my mango cheesecake with petals already falling off). What is hedonism? More importantly, what is friendship? This ♥

I can't wait for the next Saturdate. Hello to my Cul-de-sac crew. I miss you so.

One Day by David Nicholls

"Live each day as if it's our last', that was the conventional advice, but really who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn't practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at...something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance."

Hello, blog (and books). I've missed you.