Field of dreams

A day before the birthday, I dropped by Powerbooks-Robinson’s Place hoping to finally find Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland—a long wait. With the hassles (as always) of having to be in Manila for work, it was in itself a big treat. I voraciously read through my idle time at night, at the airport and inside the plane. I haven’t written an entry about a book I’ve read for so long a time, I can’t even remember what it was, but I just have to now.

It is understandable why O’Neill’s ingenuous and unique ode to New York “echoes” the great F. Scott Fitzgerald novel The Great Gatsby: it’s a modern retelling of the American Dream; here shared and narrated exquisitely in the lives of non-Americans Dutch Hans van den Broeck and Trinidadian Chuck Ramkissoon, their convergence revolving on the non-American sport of cricket. Yet, Americans would very much find their own places here in the not-so familiar nooks of New York. It is beautifully written, as evidenced by Hans’s retrospections and introspections full of imaginative vividness, nuanced by a great sense of longing and melancholy, yet also brimming with so much life. O’Neill writes beautiful passages that mirror layers of meanings-the wearing down of geo-cultural barriers, the empty field of dreams which we all are eager to fill with our own grandiose ones, the perpetual restiveness of man, and also, ultimately, love.

"I felt above all, tired. Tiredness: if there ws a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness....A banal state of affairs, yes-but our problems were banal, the stuff of women's magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women's magazines."

"But surely everyone can also testify to another, less reckonable kind of homesickness, one having to do with unsettlements that cannot be located in spaces of geography or history; and accordingly it's my belief that the communal, contractual phenomenon of New York cricket is underwritten, there where the print is finest, by the same agglomeration of unspeakable individual longings that underwrites cricket played anywhere--longings concerned with horizons and potentials sighted or hallucinated and in any event lost long ago, tantalisms that touch on the undoing of losses too private and reprehensible to be acknowledged to oneself, let alone to others. I cannot be the first to wonder if what we see, when we see men in white take to a cricket field, is men imagining an environment of justice. "

"Rebel with a curse"

Sometimes I think book-fanatics who want to go see the film adaptation of their well-loved story should even think twice in the first place. The nosiest insufferable know-it-alls that they normally are, they should be banned from entering the theatre and public viewings or premieres and instead make a specialized screening where they can forever gloat in perpetuating their expertise which quite a select people give a damn anyway. This goes for the Harry Potter franchise, most especially, whose majority of the fan base feel that the film versions unjustly treated the material. Believe me, I wouldn’t want to go see an entire visual replica of a book because aside from being unbearably long, what’s the point?

I also want to contend that while some may opine that watching film adaptations the likes of Harry Potter without having to read the book first is an agonizing tedium, I believe that readers have a tougher job sitting through the entire running time. First, I believe that a film stands out as a film, one you can conveniently extricate from its material, and second, readers have the difficult job of having to distance the original material while seeing the film version in real time, and I believe few came out successful of this tedious and tricky exercise, which again explains the irritably nosy attitude.

I haven't read the final book in the series yet so I don't have the burden to decide which of the book stands out from the rest. It may even be impossible as the stories are closely-knit with each other. I liked Potter 5, both the movie and the book, if not for the important transition for Harry, the political subtexts (which were more manifest in the book) invites a more mature discourse apart from the usual magic and spectacle that the series is known for.

Crash into me.

Nothing could have ever prepared me for J.G. Ballard's Crash. It's up to you if I'm exaggerating but seriously, it's unlike anything I've ever read before. This is a late review and I have labored finishing through what could've been a breezy read. The second-hand copy I found in one of the booksales here and bought for 35 pesos is not the book cover posted here. I could've dismissed it even for its abstract cover on a usual abrupt breeze-through in the pile's mishmash of forgotten titles. But Anthony Burgess, author of one of my favorite books A Clockwork Orange, sorta says something about the grandeur of Ballard's imagination, and the three-pronged "blood, semen, and engine coolant" sure sparked a hell of interest (*evil grin*). The 1996 film adaptation is directed by David Cronenberg and starred James Spader and Holly Hunter.

Crash narrates the ultra-unique and violent adventures of then-TV scientist Vaughan and his avid friend-follower James. Vaughan believes that humanity's fate is in the fast lane and death ultimately is a malevolent but orchestra-ic concoction of car-crash and human carnage. Vaughan envisions his final death scene with Elizabeth Taylor, while experimenting on different variations of automobile collisions. Pretty grand, huh? It solders violent sex into the concept of orgasm and automobile crash as a perfect junction in achieving a different state of nirvana. In a dreamy scene inside a car, James watches Vaughan and his wife perform rigorous, mechanical sex while the automobile is car-washed. Some fetishistic sicko, huh? But no, like the 'underground literature' that it claims it is, the novel is uncompromising in its imagination, and for believing so much in the notion of Vaughan's obsession, this is a great diversion. The psychological exploration of man is just an after-taste. You should be entranced in the hallucinatory and hypnotic ride.

the smell of the devil incarnate

Jean-Baptiste Grenouille was born with no distinct smell. Despite being thrown in the garbage amidst the stench of rotting fishes, he managed to survive. Despite the absence of human smell, his olfactory sense is a hundred times more active than a normal human being. He can detect a smell within a mile, even the unidentifiable ones, the ones not listed in the dictionary of smells -- if ever there is one. He has mastered the skill of concocting perfumes from a plethora of ingredients. In no time, he was able to surpass the famous perfumers in France. He skips from one town to another to pursue his only dream of becoming the greatest perfumer in the world. So great was this obsession, intensified by his goal to create the most perfect smell which can only be extracted from 24 virgins.

Aside from his unique olfactory gift, his survival is one of unbelievable. At the snap of a finger, he is cured from a rare terminable disease upon hearing that the extraction of smells can also be done by a special process of distillation. After hiding in a mountain cave for eight years, and being literally devoured by earth and decompositors, he still lived. He lives for himself alone and does not feel accountable to anybody. He can only feel hatred. Not compassion nor love. And yet people who bump into him regard him as probably the most innocent man they've ever laid their eyes on.

Das Parfum (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer) has got to be one of the weirdest books I've ever read. But it's a weirdness that leaves you with amazement. Originally written in German, the translation is impeccable. Every page seethes with an obsessive quality, as if the untraceable smells draw you into the same evil obsession. The ending is explosive. It's so amazingly wicked that I'd spare you the details and I want you to read for yourself. But the film adaptation of this novel was released last year, so if you can't find this book in any booksale you can watch the film. But I doubt it would have the same belief-suspending qualities that would make you gasp as with the book.

Astutely economical.

Or economically astute.

In a special report, The Guardian challenged contemporary authors to be economical. The feature says that Ernest Hemingway considered his best work to have come in a six-word story: 'For sale: baby shoes, never worn.'

Yann Martel, author of the immensely entertaining and courageous Life of Pi has this --

"The Earth? We ate it yesterday."

Elmore Leonard, famous for his film-adapted novels Get Shorty, Out of Sight, Jackie Brown wrote --

Bob's last message: Bermuda Triangle, Baloney.

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