Three Books & Aflutter

Real World

Natsuo Kirino

PHP 588 Fully Booked

It feels more comfortable to live in a world where we no longer describe Asian Women Writers as “twice marginalized.” There is a comforting pride in saying, instead, Japanese Feminist author. “Real World,” however, is not exactly set out to restore faith in human dignity or describe a bubbly teenage world. This fiction is about hard truths in compelling stories that reveal, in this diagram how much parents understand their children and why they live in their own world.

(1)    How much adults know
(2)    How much teenagers know
(3)    How much adults understand teenagers

I couldn’t always understand myself back then. But I knew I lived in a terrifically amusing world for first times, of survival. Reading this novel now, I understand that my spirit will probably never be as bright as it was then. Adults live as shadows of themselves.

Interpreter of Maladies

Jhumpa Lahiri

PHP 145 BookSale

The literature on the immersion, mixture and eventual diffusion of cultures create a rich, familiar language. Those stories are spoken in a language of adaptation, like songs sung in the same lyrical voice. It is a voice that longs, and then beautifully, fulfills itself.  As if to say, I am writing about this country while I discover my own.

What impressed me was how the writer says determined things softly and tells us that the embracing of different cultures is a happy marriage of contradiction. The stories speak of sadness, infidelity, of love that has been lost, of love that has not been returned or replaced. There’s not a lot of joy. But as you read how the stories are told, there is reassurance, and eventual realization of hope and fulfilment.

The Marriage Plot

Jeffrey Eugenides

PHP315 (paperback) National Bookstore

(Currently reading, 166 pages read)

An uplifting read that makes you aflutter as in the Novels of Jane Austen, Edith Wharton or Thomas Hardy. Love sows its seeds in a Brown University Semiotics class, when it was agitating the landscape of literary theory in the early 1980s, between discussions of how Culler made Derrida’s work digestible.  I succumb to the temptation of telling a dumb joke by saying that I applied specific knowledge from the stuff I picked up in those elective courses I took in College, even if the only application is to enjoy what you’re reading. More importantly, this book is also about the most favoured time of life: College and the Post-College dilemma that follows immediately after. You enjoy, because your memory jogs around your own coming of age.