Lit Geek Update #10

Last book I read: Soledad's Sister by Jose Dalisay

This book ended my (relatively) long reading hiatus. Poring through its first page at a bookstore roused my slumbering lust for print on paper. I finished the novel in a jiffy because putting it down without having read it to the last page was difficult. The pepper was as much the absurdity of the image of a dead woman in an erroneously labeled casket brought home aboard a plane and the numerous, similarly absurd stories it brings together to its unlikely wake, as the author's signature masterful hand at language, plot and characterization. Butch Dalisay is "old school"-- and it is a school all lovers of Philippine Literature had better keep themselves in.

For some strange reason, the book made me think briefly of George Eliot's Middlemarch, what with the seemingly random lives that really interlace, the vivid introspection of life's sad ludicrousness and the seamlessness with which the novel's junctures are brought together.

The caustic wit and humor are all Dalisay's own.




What I'm reading now: Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt