Damn. Is this a novel or a poem? I have never read anything as meticulous as this, and honestly, I’m not well-read enough to catch all his references, but holy shit, this was so fun to read, if not just for the precision of Nolledo’s prose. Its colorfulness, its charm… The fucking wordplay! The allegories! The allusions! If I had a proper education I would be able to name all the other techniques he seemed to just seamlessly and consistently use throughout this novel — and that would’ve been more than enough to call it a masterpiece, just formally — but I’m not nearly that smart, and Nolledo’s not just a pretty wordsmith.

What I am is a Filipino, whatever the fuck that means, and what this book about the Japanese occupation in Manila during WW2 does for me is point to the origins of that confused feeling. I think the most telling passage showing Nolledo’s unique ability to problematize our national identity in the most culturally Filipino way (i.e. satirically and somberly at the same time; jokingly and then seriously, and then back again until you’re no longer able to distinguish which is which…) is the penultimate chapter bearing the enjambed, parallel descriptions of two battles for Manila by, essentially, the same Empire, as far as we’re concerned. As if to point out (as if he knew…) that we are still, to this day, in the throes of postcolonial intercourse. 

I love this guy. He honestly writes like the buang everyone in your small town knows and ignores, but I STAND BY HIM. Everything that comes out of his mouth is absolutely horrifying, but he says it in such a funny way, you feel bad for laughing after. It took me forever to finish this because I had to recover after every cartoonish nightmarish chapter, rendered so vividly in my mind like a Fincher movie. This guy understands what its like to live inside history, to have ghosts of history enjamed everywhere we look, to be walking in and amongst history, how absurd it all is. How funny. How absolutely tragic.

I am so gonna read this again.