Receive Salamanca Compiled By Dean Francis Alfar Distributed As Interactive EBook
book shared a lot of the feeling with Love in the Time of Cholera and reminiscent of the style of the referenced Without Seeing The Dawn by Javellana,
The perfectly molded world by Alfar came wondrously at Tagbaoran and Manila, both being tastes of the simplicity and fecundity of life, Filipino culture, even politics and history, was greatly reflective of the long postJapanese and Marcos dictatorship era, Less of those, but Gaudencio's life affairs and search for himself came through tough, A short novel but explorative of a whole lifetime for all characters beautifully written in the many backstories and quick wit,
I enjoyed this very much, with the magical going lesser by the end, Similar to how a child's maturity goes, Just as quick. But definitely worth the magical and odd ride in Salamanca! Seriously can't get into this book at all, Might come back to it when I have more time in my life,
With that, I leave you with a little anecdote:
It was my last year at uni and I went to this lecture about experimental fiction by author redacted.
This guy has been to some of my class workshops and I like the way he thinks, His work can be somewhat too experimental for my taste, but at least he's pushing the boundaries whatever that means,
When he mentioned Dean Alfar, he said that Salamanca was like singing karaoke, I had no idea what he was talking about at that time, but reading this, I realise that he was right, This reads like he's following a format, following lyrics written by someone else, The flamboyant events, the purple prose: very Latin American, Is this really Pinoy Hmm, what with the insidious Americanisation of our country, I can say that yes, Salamanca is still representative of Philippine literature, BUT IT'S NOT REPRESENTATIVE OF FILIPINO LITERATURE AS A WHOLE, This serves as no new standard in magic realist novels anywhere, Don't even point to this novel when talking about Philippine Spec Lit with me, It might be enjoyable, but I don't see it as anything new, Frankly, I like his short stories better, I never thought that I will cry because of this book, so much emotions specially in the last part, Watered down magic realism. Then add some historical details then call it speculative fiction, One brilliant passage of American woman screaming obscenities in multiple tongues, but lazy moments too, especially the summarylike ending, This text won an award How epic like and tragic, this is my first philippine historical fiction read, and it was good but not spectacular, i find the characters development were brief because the author made the story shorter than the average novel, but it was easy to understand and the prose was somewhat erotic and magical and at the same time, for adult readers only.
It was a fun read, not bad at all, I initially thought that the narrative was a bit hurried at the last part however, I still find the way time was narrated in this novel as something splendid, Indeed a story of how love survives and strives in the calamities of life, This book is a requirement from my college literature course, To be honest, i never read much Philippine Literature, This book for sure is one of the best and I'm glad i had a chance to read it,
“The first two things Gaudencio Rivera was made aware ofwithin hours of arriving by carabaodrawn cart at the secluded town of Tagbaoran on the island province of Palawanwere these: that the most beautiful woman in creation dwelt by the river, and that it was pointless to even dream of being loved by her.
”
Dean Francis Alfar, Salamanca Read it, It's not all happy but for all its supernatural elements it's quite raw and real, I did not expect to be in tears by the end of it but I was hahaha, This book just made it into my favorite reads of all time, So many feels A luminously sensuous family chronicle that could easily sit next to the best of Gabriel García Márquez, The evolution of Gaudencio from lustful bisexual philanderer into content family man is filled with tragedy and wonder, and Alfar's light touch with the fantastic here elevates the narrative to mythic proportions.
Simply put, I didn't want the book to end, but it does so on exactly the right note, Dean Francis Alfar is a wizard of prose, the possessor of a very special kind of narrative salamanca, and his voice deserves to be heard the world over, Our professor required us to read this book back when I was in college and this could totally be a really weird book for some, but it really is sort of good.
I could really refer to it as a "high magical fiction" because Dean Francis Alfar has this very, very wide imagination,
It is somehow odd, but the middle part to the ending was really good, "After everything, you must know that I love you, "
This ending. I'm so huhu The book has its working on me, . . my tears just flowed with that ending, Its awards are well deserved,
UPDATE:
“What happens to memory when it vanishes What happens to events when everyone who remembers them ceases to remember”
It rekindled the passion of writing in my journals.
Thank you Dean. You sowed within my heart the importance of writing once again, Even writing for people I cherish,
So now, with the review proper, The flow of the story is a masterpiece, It reflects the characters perfectly, It was told with colorful and creativity and lots of salamanca, when the characters are still young and as they grow old, the salamanca in it is diminishing little by little.
But in the end, it all fall back to the start with all the magic!
The last few pages struck me, I wish to stop reading to halt the impeding flow of tears, but the pull of salamanca in the book is much stronger than my will,
I clung to the book until the very last letter, That ending, that letter is the perfect finale, The brief content of the letter answered all my questions, Its just the mother of all endings!
A fecund, oversexed imagination is on display in this first novel by Filipino writer Dean Francis Alfar, the main proponent of speculative fiction in the country.
The sorcery of the title refers to the fuel that powers an imaginary Spanish galleon to soar through the skies, The galleon is a fixture in certain fantastical short stories written by Gaudencio Rivera, the bisexual male lead of the novel, His fount of creativity is derived from his love affairs, betrayals, and promiscuity, Lovemaking fuels Gaudencio's haphazard literary activity,
Sometime in thes, Gaudencio runs away from Manila to Palawan Island to escape a love affair gone wrong, There he encounters Jacinta Cordova, a young woman of peerless beauty, "Her beauty was of such purity and perfection that the walls of the house she lived in had turned transparent long ago, to allow both sunlight and moonlight to illuminate her incandescence.
" This is a love story,
At the moment that their eyes met through the seethrough walls of the inconceivable house, Gaudencio dropped the cigarette in his hand as he was devastated by exposure to Jacintas luminous beauty.
He felt an almost unbearable torrent of words rise up through his body: inarticulate syllables swiftly welled up from the soles of his feet combining into nouns at his knees, verbs at his loins, adjectives and adverbs by the time they reached his heart joined by prepositions and conjunctions from his hands and arms becoming phrases, clauses, then whole sentences when they reached his head, threatening to erupt not only from his lips but also seeking immediate egress from his eyes, ears, and nose before finally causing his hair to writhe as whole paragraphs, chapters, short stories, novellas, and novels recoiled backwards, suffusing his entire being with the terrible power of unspoken expression.
The magical absurdity of that passage is consistent with the novel's use of lust and love as materials for fictional creation, It is a creative act that expands fictional boundaries, for we are in the territory of magical realism, It is easy to fall prey to the trappings and overused routines of magic, Alfar's beautiful sentences, however, are the building blocks of a luminous structure that is this very novel,
Salamanca manages to convey significant aspects of postwar Philippine history while telling an exuberant tale of love, identity, and exile, The way Alfar intertwined the landmarks and history of the Palawan Island setting into the novel's larger story is particularly awesome at least to me, who has been living in Palawan for some time now.
The novel deploys magic as more than an instrument of speculation, Magic is here a transgressive force, The early scene of a powerful storm for instancewherein the characters, together with their freely flowing hormones, are carried aloft by an accelerating whirlwindis an outrageous, comic set piece, Unlike the barren magic of certain popular novelists for instance, Haruki Murakami, the magic in Salamanca has been disabused of its kneejerk reactions,
The seemingly whimsical telling of the plot creates, well, magic, Gaudencio exploits his experiences, his loves, and his many betrayals of themlike his betrayal of Jacinta that resulted to their shortlived weddingas materials for his writing career, Similarly, Alfar churns up new plot elements and characters with the spontaneous resolve of an aesthete, Part of his strength lies in the efficiency of his quick character sketches, Characters are added incrementally, and despite their brief appearances and the spare details about them, the readers feel invested in their stories,
There's a lot to unpack in this short novel which in its own way offers a synthesis of postwar Philippine history, not a magical slice of that history but the whole cake.
At the start of the novel, Gaudencio is in the United States, homesick and planning to return to the Philippines to impregnate his estranged wife Jacinta,
Seven years after the complete destruction of Manilaville in Louisiana, the dissolute author Gaudencio Rivera decided to settle the matter of his incoherent sexuality and beget a child.
His sudden announcementmade during a dinner party held in Los Angeleswas greeted first with laughter, then moments later with stupefaction, when a minor earthquake struck to seal the veracity of his declaration.
As the small party sat under the shuddering table watching the room sway, Gaudencio told them that there came a time in every mans life to part the gossamer curtain that separated childhood from the real world that in his case, the moment had been too long in its postponement that artistsespecially gifted writers like himselfwhile often able to crystallize miraculous observations of mundane things, were sometimes blinded to more important matters and that, ultimately, women were necessary to continue humanitys existence, even if, occasionally, men proved to be better bedmates.
Manilaville is a settlement for Filipinos in Louisiana, later destroyed by a powerful hurricane, Gaudencio mirrors the experience of immigrant Filipino writers, those who continue to long for their country even as they seek to establish their literary careers abroad, The name has a correlate with Vietville which also figures in the novel, Vietville is also a settlement community, the first generation of which were Vietnamese refugees who fled their country during the Vietnam War, They arrived by boat to Palawan after a long journey at sea, The plight of exiled citizens and writers, what defines their rootedness in a certain home country, is one of the novel's dramatic strands,
This novel is also notable for its bending not only of genre but of gender, "Men, Women and Other Fictions" is the title of the second of three chapters of the novel, indicating how gender is here almost ignored as a deterministic criterion in choosing the sexual orientation of characters.
The bisexual Gaudencio fills a gender gap in the characterization of male lovers in Philippine literary novels, at least novels of "epic and sprawling" ambition like Salamanca, novels which consciously integrate historical details and markers in their text.
The novel also makes reference to the use of magic as a political strategy of writers during the period
of dictatorship after Marcos declared Martial Law in the country in.
The opportune use of fantastical elements in stories "permitted veiled criticisms of the nation's dictatorial regime without risking a visit from the police and an interminable incarceration in Fort Bonifacio, or any of the other venues where enemies of the government were routinely tortured, earning the sad victims the appellation 'desaparecidos,' the Vanished Ones.
"
Most significantly, Alfar makes a metaphoric case for sexual appetite as the "life force" of literary imagination,
"Do you still write" Gaudencio asked him,
"No," Antonio replied with a mischievous smile, "I make babies. "
"You really are an artist," Gaudencio said, blinking his eyes, . . "Possessed by an imperative to create, "
The imagined leap from the promiscuity of procreation to the promiscuity of creativity is one way of looking at art as perpetual giving birth to and bringing forth of artworks, the progeny of the imagination.
Sexual reproduction as the mode of literary production: the prolific outputs of Gaudencio are direct products of his sexual proclivity, "His muse was the instant of passion", that instant when he "experienced his body's familiar transubstantiation of carnal lust to sublime vocabularies, and he would mentally partition texts as they were composed in his mind".
Alfar seems to be hinting that, in the continuing process of national imagining and becoming, the liberal attitudes toward sexuality is the liberating force that makes us aware of the mystery of love and existence.
Selfawareness is that other modernist quality of the novel that makes it refreshing, Salamanca is a highly aware novel, aware of its opportunistic "exploitation" of human experience as fictional material, of magical elements as a creative force, of the politics of literary creation, of the national literary tradition it seeks to be an essential part of, and of the debilitating histories of colonialism and dictatorship.
The witty selfreferences and historical asides, on top of transgressive magic and emotional subtlety, make for a novel of verbal and sensual riches,
One character in the novel describes salamanca as the thing that makes one see what is being described, This is the power of imagery to reveal images from words alone, This is also the power of fiction to portray ideas that reflect the sheen of reality, Through some hitherto unheard of black magic sourced from some enchanted cave, Alfar shows that the novel is a magical thing toosalamanca itself,
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