Play with Me

Early this year I saw a news feature on either CNN or BBC about the proliferation of bear attacks in a European countryside. The attacks were due to the decreasing habitat of bears and the increasing human population in the said area. The thing that struck me most was this vignette about a man who adopted a baby bear, apparently left by its mother, who wandered into his home one time. The bear became fond of the man and there were pictures and videos of him frolicking with the bear even. Yet, despite this close, almost-human father and son relationship, when the authorities learned about it the bear was taken away from the man. I found my mouth hanging open while watching the scene unfold. I mean, it was barely five minutes (at least that part, the whole feature was probably around ten to fifteen minutes) and yet it felt like I've read something eerily similar to what just unfolded before my eyes.

And that book is Troll: A Love Story, written by Johanna Sinisalo and translated by Herbert Lomas to English. I know trolls aren't bears. Trolls are even eh, fictional to begin with. But Sinisalo's story begins almost in the same fashion. Bear with me, I'll be rambling about another book I finished a month or so ago so this might appear quite eh, all over the place. Then again, that's the way I write.

Angel, upon returning home one night, found a handful of gangster tormenting a creature huddled in snow. After successfully shooing the guys away, he realised that the creature is none other than a troll, hurt and possibly dying in his hands at that moment. He quickly brought home the creature and tried to nourish it back to health. So begins his adventures, but not quite. You see, meeting with the troll isn't the first part of the story. The first scene goes back to Angel's rejection by Martes, after a previous fling. And it's this feeling of hurt, of rejection that prevails over the entire book, under the guise of a love story.

Because it is a love story. Or more like a story with the different faces of love coming into play. There's Angel and his obsession with Martes, the guy who led him on. There's this obsession of Ecke, who sees Angel in a bar, falls for him, stalks him and tries to woo him. There's Palomita, the maid-to-order bride from the Philippines who is obsessed with the idea of Angel as a saviour. There's Martes and the dangerous game of love he plays. There's the veterinarian, Dr. Spiderman, Angel's previous boyfriend, who observes things from afar with the complex feelings of those having to deal with exes. And of course, Angel's love for the troll he named Pessi and the latter's affection to his rescuer as well, like a parent to a child. Except that Pessi is a troll, a wild creature of the night. Oh wait, I exchanged the word obsession with love there. I didn't mean to, but I guess love takes the form of obsession, one time or another. And it's that aspect that turns this seemingly fantastic tale into a dark story about love, rejection and acceptance.

That sounds a bit dramatic but this short novel does have a wide range of complex yet familiar emotions enveloping all the characters you meet. It isn't melodramatic but full of muted suspense I held my breath at the end of chapters, particularly the ones leading to the conclusion. The story is divided into different points of view of different characters, interspersed with imagined history of trolls in Finland and beyond; it feels like a Jello shot with too much sugar and vodka you don't feel its effects until you try to walk and eh, fail. You end up feeling for every character, one way or another, because you understand the kind of love they want, the kind they can give.

While I enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone, I do have one major qualm and that is with respect to the translation of the Filipino phrase used by Palomita near the end of the book, the one that starts with "Ang hiya lalaki nasa noo...." You see, I'm Filipino like Palomita. Tagalog is my first language and I'm very much familiar with the other dialects in the other major islands of the country. While I can accept the notion that someone from the outskirts of Zamboanga speaks or thinks in Tagalog in a foreign country out of artistic license from the author, a bit of research would have helped. Given the background on Palomita in the book, I'd place her as speaking either Chavacano, Bisaya or Ilonggo even, depending on the location of her hometown and definitely not Tagalog because you rarely hear people speak that even if Tagalog/Filipino is taught at school, which eh, Palomita even lacked. It's part of the regionalistic nature of us, Pinoys. Like I said, I accept the notion of artistic license on this aspect.

My main concern is the translation. The problem with the translation, for me, is quite simple. That first line is grammatically incorrect as it lacks a conjunction but that's not my complaint. The mistake is the use of the word "hiya" at all. The English translation in the book (since Palomita thought of them sometime in the last quarter of the story) refers to honor as hiya. That is so wrong. Totally. Hiya translates to either shame or modesty depending on usage (yes, our vocabulary can be weird, which can be said of all vocabularies, I think. I mean, a good example of which is the word "mahal" which can either mean beloved or expensive. Hahaha.) But not and never will be honor. And it put me off. If Sinisalo wanted "honor" she should've used "dangal" instead.

Of course, my complaint is only material to those who understand Tagalog. Non-Tagalog speaking readers wouldn't even notice the difference seeing that the entire Tagalog statements had corresponding translations in the story. Still, it put me off. So much for short Tagalog lessons. Let's not start on other regional dialects now. And yes, I love Tagalog. I'm quite severe to Pinoys misusing it, what more foreigners who do.

Thank You

For making this world a much better place with your stories.

Diana Wynne Jones

August 16, 1934 - March 26, 2011

You will be missed.

Part 2

Last night I read Shirley Jackson's short story titled The Lottery and now I know why people who read The Hunger Games compared that with the early scene wherein Katniss's sister Prim was earlier chosen to be a tribute from District 12, as achingly similar. I agree. But I won't delve on that because I think Shirley Jackson deserves a separate post. What I need to do today (I think of it as a box waiting to be ticked off) is to end my ramblings on Mockingjay. Yes, Mockingjay.

I have my own issues with it and today's a good day to let it all hang out. By all, meaning whatever I can translate into this medium. It's a difficult story to discuss. When I see friends who have read the book, we rile at the "fans" who are merely after the love angle; a point I previously dealt with in Prelude. So now I'd like to get into the actual story itself which might prove difficult considering that I don't have the book here in the metro. Tsk tsk tsk. I do rely on my pretend-eidetic memory and to the fact that the book still resonates with me to be able to do a passable job, fingers-crossed.

Mockingjay starts with Katniss visiting the bombed out District 12 after a month or so recuperating from her injuries suffered from the Quarter Quell. While her mother and sister Prim are safe in District 13, she worries for Peeta, who remains captured in the Capitol. Then she sees the perfect stem of rose in her room, which somehow remains untouched. All her anger is now focused on one person, President Snow. She vows he has to die for the suffering to end. Eventually she agrees to become the symbol of the revolution while Alma Coin, District 13's head, and her minions plan a strategic attack on President Snow and the rest of Panem. While District 13 prepares for war, Katniss's reunion with Peeta proved difficult. Peeta, drugged and programmed, so to speak, lashes out against Katniss upon his rescue. In the final assault on the Capitol, Katniss again realises that her role is just another pawn in a war for power. And in her last act as the Mockingjay, she sends a message that reverberated throughout Panem.

I asked myself whether I liked the final book and it was quite easy for me to answer "No" at the time I finished it. It's because I hated Katniss in this one. I didn't like the fact that she allowed herself to become a pawn like that yet again. I cringed at the thought of her hiding out in one of those spaces in District 13 while the rest of the world moved on, with people trying to stay alive. She spaced out. I don't like spaced-out heroes. I mean, I was Team Katniss through and through but every time I turned the page I felt like she was going to break under pressure. And she did. At least the way I see her.

Good thing? As far as dystopian settings are concerned, the book addressed not just the shift from one oppressive government to a similar if not more troubling one. Lest we forget, the vital aspect of the entire trilogy is to change the government, to change Capitol, basically to free the people who have been oppressed and made to serve the whims of the prosperous ruling class. Stories dealing with revolutions aren't easy reads in general, but with the three books, Collins addressed the conflict in an accessible manner. Introducing Coin in the mix, with the grey hair, living in the totally grey surroundings that is District 13, the symbolism is quite obvious. Here is an option for change but taking everything in, is she really the answer against President Snow? I love the shrewdness of the juxtaposition, the option that is not really a good one. The powerlessness of the choice Katniss had to make to survive, when asked if she'd be willing to become the symbol of the revolution is one of the better things about the story. And her final act that would hopefully spur the districts not to make the same mistakes as the previous Capitol, is priceless.

As far as the characters are concerned, those we already knew remained true to their selves. Katniss, spaced-out, is still Katniss, the passive citizen turned soldier, spurred to fight to protect those she loves. I've to admit that reading was quite a pain, at times. I don't like my lead character wasting pages, so to speak, by hiding. But it's in those moments of doubts, of close to giving up that summarises her essence: she didn't want any of it. That has been her mantra from the first book onwards. She didn't want it but she had to do something. Katniss is not the hero we wanted her to be. If she was Frodo, she'd give the ring to Boromir, probably. This wasn't a heroic quest. I keep forgetting that part, thinking that Katniss will grow a backbone soon to stop people from using her. In fact, if there was a hero character through and through it is Peeta, although we never had that much on Peeta in this final book.

The other thing I didn't like, the main reason I told myself this is the worst book of the three, which can be thematic as well, is the heartbreaking thing that Katniss suffered in the Capitol. Seriously. It made me question the whole thing. I didn't like it but it made things real for Katniss. It unhinged her, alright, but made things real. The bigger picture will tell you that death occurs randomly, that wars aren't fought with a certain number of survivors unscathed all the time. Katniss had to suffer yet again to see that she couldn't go on being passive on an important aspect of the revolution. It was heartbreaking, yes, but something I think Collins felt necessary. For a moment there I put Collins in the Joss Whedon School of Creators Killing Their Beloved Characters. It's the message Collins chose to tell her story.

What I don't understand, on some reviews I've read, is the anger some of the readers felt about Katniss, about not telling us, readers, of her plans for that last scene in the Capitol. Goodness, wasn't it obvious? To me, it was. Weren't you guys reading, too? It should've been obvious from the start. In fact it should've been obvious, if you were paying attention, from the time that she lost the most important thing in her life. Go read the first book again as to why. And then the second book. And reread Mockingjay again. If you still missed it, it was plain as day when she started looking for answers in the conversation with her sworn enemy. Not the act but the motive on that fateful day. As readers, we're so quick to heap Katniss all qualities of a leader's role we failed to see her for what she is: just another teenager on the verge of a breakdown. And most of you guys hated her for her apparent breakdown when in fact she made the sanest decision she could have done when the opportunity presented itself. I may not liked Katniss as the spaced-out symbol but on that moment, my faith in her was restored.

I still like the first book best, even if my liking it is somehow tainted by the fact that it reads too much like Battle Royale (which I read later than HG). The first book is a good story. A story that makes you want to read more. Something that makes you care for the characters placed in the difficult situation in Panem. The second book suffers from the cliffhanger ending. Kidding but true. It felt incomplete, that one. The third book I think focused too much on the message. A message that, to me, is obviously lost on those merely after the love angle between Katniss, Peeta and Gale. Kidding, but not quite. I like the message but not the story. But I concede that it's a good way to end the trilogy. And with that I end this rambling.

Prelude [or Ramblings on Mockingjay Part I]

A part of me believes that Mr. Burns from The Simpsons can easily portray President Snow in my version of The Hunger Games trilogy. He's despotic, he gets what he wants, and he has this sinister air about him, which makes him perfect. And he owns the nuclear plant, which supplies power in the town of Springfield. I remember telling my friend Anj about Mr. Burns one time, after dinner, when our conversation lapsed into actors fit for the roles available in the film version of Suzanne Collins' books. I couldn't even remember Mr. Burns' name and her husband Jan supplied it for me. I didn't get the response I wanted; then again he's a cartoon and she was talking about real actors.


I still firmly believe that Mr. Burns is the perfect President Snow. Maybe my brain is wired to play a cartoonized, rather Simpsonized version of the trilogy with Lisa Simpson playing Katniss, out to save Maggie from the tribute. It's a weird thought. Lisa cannot be Katniss but she can play the part because she's smart, brave and stubborn. However, Lisa isn't passive.

Which is my main concern with Mockingjay, the final book in the trilogy. I finished it early this year and let it stew in my brain until now. The lingering memory still is my belief that Mr. Burns should play President Snow in the film version. Hahaha.

It's pointless to read this post if you haven't read the trilogy, unless you're one of my three constant readers. If that's the case, welcome back. I'll start with this: there's a certain agony involved in waiting for the final book. Those of us who read it waiting for the final installment probably had a lot of scenarios in mind for Mockingjay: death, destruction, rescue, revolution. And the waiting can drive you crazy, if you're that serious a fan. That or if you're one of those simply waiting for the resolution of the apparent triangle: Peeta or Gale, which I think is a far crazier reason for reading the trilogy, scenarios of reunion or rejection. Personally, if all you are after is who would Katniss choose in the end, I think it's better if you buy yourself a love story and get your satisfaction from there.

I actually have no qualms about the love angle in the books. If you've read my two previous posts about it and my final thoughts prior to Mockingjay's release, you'll see that the choice, if she should decide, is actually obvious. I do have qualms about her choosing anyone, really. She's young. If she survives the last book, she should live her life and choose whoever she wants, even outside of Peeta and Gale. But we live in a world where opinions of readers about love angles get a life of its own. I've qualms about the magnification of the Team Peeta versus Team Gale by those who prioritize the love angle over and above the themes of the books. Seriously people, a dystopian community where kids kill each other and all that's important to you is Katniss should pick either Peeta or Gale? The way I see it, it's an obvious projection of personal choices of future partners; the proverbial questions: someone who loves you or someone you love, the boy you just met or the boy whose been there all along, the one who treats you as a princess or the one who treats you as an equal. Choices, choices. Oh of course, there's that revolution in the making, could we at least set aside love options and deal with the problem at hand?

Yes, I got tired of banners proclaiming Team Peeta or Team Gale on pages I saw online. So tired that in reading the first few pages of Mockingjay the week it was released and seeing Gale there while Katniss pines for the captured Peeta, I just had to stop and put the book down lest I write about it and eventually read blog posts about how she decided in the end. I know that the book isn't about the love angle, but if I read it at that time, I knew I'd encounter posts about the resolution of the love angle more than the resolution of the story. I encountered that scenario before: I've read the Twilight books after all.

So?

Back to the agony. The waiting part.

Reading an ongoing series is always a challenge. It's good if you pick it up somewhere in the middle, where there are a handful of books already published and you end up practically devouring one book after another. That's what happened to me with the Harry Potter books. I picked it up when the first three books were out. But waiting for the succeeding installment after was pure torture, though it helped that Rowling ended each book with a sense of closure; the kind where you wait for the next term at Hogwarts, the kind where you try to enjoy a summer break, just like Harry and the rest of the gang. Waiting is better if the series is short, like Hunger Games. I picked it up a couple of months before the release of Catching Fire. Except that when I got to the second book, Collins deemed it fit to have a cliffhanger of an ending. Oh well.

In Katniss's case, the cliffhanger was a deadly one. With Peeta captured by the forces of President Snow, Katniss is left broken and I waited with bated breath as to how the rest of the story would conclude. Obviously with a handful of thoughts in my head as to how it would probably end.

And just like that I'll leave this post hanging, too.

Define Motherhood

I have been reading Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin off and on (mostly off than on, hahaha) since late last year. I haven't read any reviews when I bought it though it had that Good Morning America: Read This! label on the cover (and I didn't buy it because of that - I don't watch Good Morning America, I live on the other side of the world).

I finally finished it a handful of days ago. For the past couple of weeks I've spent my late night and witching hour reading the book, getting further drawn in while the horror builds up page after page. It's an epistolary novel with the mother, Eva Katchadourian, writing to her husband, Franklin, about their son Kevin. Eva talks about Kevin, her son who killed more than a handful of his classmates and a teacher inside the school gym one fateful Thursday.

Frankly, I was going for the dead bear shot.

It's not an easy story to tell and that's why I admired the manner by which Shriver handled this novel. We're all probably exposed to news and documentaries about kids on a shooting spree in school and the last thing we want to read about, before we turn in at night, is a novel about a kid gone wrong, right? You just might want to pick this up. In fact, I encourage you to pick this up. On some parts you could feel the violence, yes, plus. But there's more to this book than the violence that occurred in school. It's Eva's side of the story. She writes to her husband to make sense of the tragedy, looking back from the time they both decided to have a child and her realization early on, that there is something terribly wrong about Kevin.

Given that the last book I read before I decided to finish this is Room, a part of me chuckled in disbelief at the contradictory views on motherhood when it came to play. Well, not exactly contradictory. It's just that in Room, despite the violence, the darkness enveloping the story, you could actually feel Ma's enduring love for her son, Jack. It's in Jack's voice, it's in the story. This book, on the other hand, lets you inside Eva's head, on how her son, seemingly perfect from birth, felt wrong, and how she doubted her love for her own kid, at times. I'm not going to compare the two books; I just wanted to start from there. Because in real life, not every mother is like Ma and not every kid born is like Jack, much as we want them to be.

Those of us with reading diaries or book blogs aren't all parents, but we all were children once. We all went through the parental disagreements, some more than others, probably. This is where I started relating to Eva, and to some extent, Kevin. Yes, Kevin. Seriously. While I don't think he is purely evil (even if he killed classmates he didn't like in the story), I do think, to some extent, that he wasn't brought up properly. Of course it's easy to dump that all in, it's just fiction anyway. Am I trying to find fault here? Yes and no.

Yes, because Eva herself went through the entire process of finding her own faults for the entire book. Her letters to her husband is her apology, so to speak, for her son Kevin and for herself, for feeling like she raised a monster, for not doing anything about it because she felt defeated in a battle of wills most of the time, for recognizing that at times she didn't even like her own son. These are feelings you won't necessarily hear from a mother. But Eva is an honest mother. Of course she made mistakes but that feeling of helplessness, I think, becomes part of motherhood, one way or another.

And no, because Kevin is a smart boy. Unfortunately, he's also an angry boy. He knows how to pull strings even as a kid. Like he perfected that art of annoyance even before he could speak. There are real-life Kevins out there. I believe that. Is it pure "I-gave-birth-to-Satan's-son?" kind of thing? No. But he was placed in a situation where he felt the need to kill people for kicks. Let me take that back. He grew up testing the extent of what he could get away with, and unfortunately, murder is one of them.

Kids have a well-tuned radar to detect the difference between an adult who's interested and an adult who's keen to seem interested.

And the most heartbreaking thing about the book is that both Eva and Kevin are the only ones who understand each other to the core. You cannot find fault there.

While it's not an easy book to read I think it is beautifully written. Peeking through the letters gives you that sense of intruding upon someone else's private, honest thoughts. And Eva is being her private and honest self with these letters to Franklin; all her love, regret, blame, remorse, forgiveness, sadness and hope. The last one is all she have left. Plus, love. Love, in spite of. She is Kevin's mother after all. She loved and still loves Kevin, in spite of. Which is a good thing. Because I think Kevin, in his perverted world view, feels the same about her. I can only hope that.

Getting Some

This is the third day I had Lay's Potato Chips for breakfast. It's a bit weird considering eh, potato chips aren't exactly breakfast fare, but moreso because I'm not a big fan of potato chips even. I don't like salty food. The tiniest bit of salt makes me scrunch my face in distaste. Wait, that's overly dramatic. Except that it's true. I've a very salty tastebud and I use salt sparingly when I cook. Most potato chips are salty and I could've told the Frito Lay company to hold off the salt a bit (though some of you may be thinking I could've gotten a reduced salt variety; if there is one I don't know, I beg ignorance) but that's beside the point. The point is, potato chips? Really? Yes, I probably ate my required sodium recommendation for the rest of the week with those three servings of chips (the big bag says 7 servings but I cheated) but in the end I had my cravings sated. Or that at least I hope I had my craving sated.

Cravings are funny things; one minute I'm in my longest reading and posting slump ever recorded in this blog (my other two major previous slumps I consider as "official breaks" since I was studying then, hahaha) and the next minute I crave for a book, pick and finish one in a single sitting. I'm referring to Emma Donoghue's Room. Maybe I craved that feeling: reading a story up to the end; the last time I did was way back January and I haven't even posted about those books. But there is something about Room that I cannot put down. It's one of those stories that makes you think of real-life news straight from headlines, one that paints a fictional, hopeful picture for some of the victims out there. I'm rambling from somewhere in the middle of the story already because I think I'm the last blogger to have read this. To the middling few still uninitiated, Room is a story about a young mother and her son living in eh, room. The mother, simply Ma, was abducted seven years previously and kept in a securely locked room by the villainous Old Nick for his pleasures. Jack, borne of the continuing rapes five years ago, lived his entire life believing that Room is the world and that everything else seen on TV are different planets and lots of space.

Jack's voice (the story is told in Jack's point of view) is hauntingly real. What's it like for a boy to grow up in such a small space? Donoghue charms us all with Jack. He's five. He likes watching Dora and considers her a friend. He throws tantrums here and there. He's quite a normal kid placed in such an abnormal situation. And this is where I felt like strangling Old Nick to death. Him and his real-life counterparts in this world. Because it's quite easy to be reminded, in reading Jack's story, that something similar happened to a lot of girls like Ma. I didn't feel the rage, at first. I mean, it's there from the start. Stories of rape and its consequences aren't meant to be soothing but this knot of rage became bigger and bigger as I turned the pages and be enamored of Jack's seeming innocence in all the crap he's been made to live in. Which is natural, I mean. We're all meant to cheer Jack, to hope for his rescue, to see him outside Room, among other things.

But more than Jack, this is Ma's story. It's easy to paint her with a label of a victim that refused to be victimized. It's a good label but not quite right, not quite enough. Held captive for seven years to sate the cravings of a man, Donoghue infused Ma with enough willpower to raise and protect Jack from such an ugly view of the world. It's the magic of the book for me: motherhood in spite of the villainy of Old Nick. Ma's a lioness when it comes to protecting her cub. Teaching Jack seemingly normal things in such a small Room, adapting but not accepting the situation, ensuring Jack's safety and somewhat infusing a sense of normalcy in their captive world. It is believable. It is hopeful. It is something you wish every mother should be. At least that sense of protectiveness, that much amount of love. Any woman placed in the same situation is expected to be broken easily and seven years is such a long time. But not Ma.

A story about rape and its consequences can go in different directions, can evoke strong feelings in the readers and this story does that, true, but more. A story about rape, abduction and illegal detention can be written in a sensational manner and not lack for readers. By writing a story from Jack's point of view, the idea of the crimes committed becomes accessible to the readers since the focus shifts to Jack more than Ma, to that contained room and how they survive the horrors in spite of.

True crime stories were running through my head while I was reading this so I give props for Donoghue for giving voice to those victims of the crimes similarly suffered by Ma in this story. It's one thing to know that there are real-life crimes and real-life victims like Ma and Jack, it's another to spin the story in such a memorable, unforgettable, heartbreaking tale that is both hopeful and powerful in the end.

Enter Room here and see for yourself.

Which brings to mind another story about rape, something I can't bring myself to finish, for now. While reading Room I realize that there's a certain parallel with Margo Lanagan's Tender Morsels. You see, I started reading that book a couple or so months back. Started is the operative world. It is painful to read. I'm at the point where I do not want the characters to suffer any further. I know it's fictional, but it's difficult to read. Maybe that's why I can easily sit through a difficult theme in Room hearing Jack's story through his very accessible voice but I can only give a handful of minutes of my time to devote to Liga's story, hoping against hope she won't ever suffer again, which is impossible. It's far easier for the rage to go on against Old Nick, you see. He's just one person. In Liga's case, I don't know, it's like I'd like to curse an entire fictional town. I'd like Liga and her daughters to stay magically cocooned in fantasy, safe from the prying eyes of a judgmental, unhelpful public. But that also means wishing them a life that is not real. It's difficult and I'll leave it at that. I'll finish it sometime soon, but not right now. So yes, I'm chicken. I worry about my heart, you see, it's a bit wobbly in places and I might not be able to handle Liga, Branza and Urdda's heartbreaks any further. It's part of my bedside pile but it's the last book I reach out for when I feel like reading something before sleep. Maybe I need a dose of some courage pill before I finish it. That or heart medicines.

I Resolve

I have neglected this long enough that any promise to come back and write about books sometime in the future would sound like a broken record. Life, or lack of it in my case, has a way of messing up my routine of typing stuff I picked up from reading. Nowadays, it's rare that I get to write about anything. Rarer still to actually finish reading something. Any chance I have in front of the computer is spent playing Angry Birds or doing other games. It's like I totally forgot about the blog.

But I'm posting now to tell myself I should not neglect this. Crazy, right? I post this so I won't neglect this. So if I fail to post this, this entire typing exercise would be for naught. Something you guys won't know unless I press the Publish button. Crazy indeed.

While I remind myself not to continue neglecting this venue, I should also tell myself to finish a book already. Like soon. Like now. It's no good leaving a lot of books unfinished. I have a lot of those strewn all over the place.

So my resolution this March is to read and write. Simple. That way I can get my life in order. Hopefully. So that other things fall into place.