PinoyThing Contest: Win FREE 1 year's LibraryThing membership!

I just won this LibraryThing bookpile contest. I won a free 1 year's membership (the kind that gives you UNLIMITED books to enter, if only for one year). That's a $10 value! (um, yay.)

I'm raffling the membership off to the winner of a PinoyThing forum contest!

Rules are simple: Write a 200-word-or-more review of a Filipino book in your LibraryThing collection. Book must be written by a Filipino, or about the Philippines or Filipinos, can be in English or Filipino. Post a link to the review in this thread. Whoever writes the best review, in my opinion, wins.

Deadline is January 15, 2007.

Any questions?

ah, i would so take advantage of this ...

good luck to everyone who enters, though!

What a great idea, micketymoc. 200 words is most do-able.

micketymoc, I've been thinking about your challenge. Can I just post the 200-word review on this thread since I don't know how to post elsewhere and then link here?

My entry.

The Walk: Stories by Joy T. Dayrit (Office of Research and Publications, Ateneo de Manila University, 1992)

This deceivingly slender book of 13 short stories seems to be the only solo publication by Joy Dayrit. Her stories exhibit talent entwined with the brawn of disciplined vision, are carefully crafted, quietly executed, and pack an emotional wallop at a deep level.

The first 3 stories ("The Mourners," "Roda," and "At a DInner Party,") are linked fiction revolving around a small group of young friends. Roda has apparently died from a short illness. Ben, Greg and Ina struggle to find balance among themselves in her final absence. The second and third stories return to the days when Roda was alive, especially "Roda," which illuminates her value as the glue that bound the group together. After reading the 3 stories, I felt personally bereft, sadder at the loss of the group's equilibrium and innocence, than the actual death of Roda.

Dayrit's voice throughout the book is sure and clear, artfully telling the stories without getting in the way. No fancy literary tricks or whimsical smoke and mirrors--the author couples insight with clean writing. The voice may be consistent, but the stories provide a rainbow of entertainment and situation. "A Quiet Infidelity" limns the unrequited passion of Clara for Noel, who is now a priest, still devoted to his vocation, but weary and uninspired. “The Tour” presents a newlywed couple at conflict over the wife’s pregnancy.

In my favorite story, "Playing Goddess," a young female narrator boards in the home of a Spanish Baronesa in Madrid. Dayrit evokes that feeling of transience that becomes permanent in a reader's mind, the suspension between the past and the future, but which is not quite the present. The characters in the boarding house are interesting enough--an Argentinian musician, a married couple, and a Japanese writer of romantic interest to the narrator--but the palpable feeling of isolation from reality is also a real entity in this obra, reminiscent of Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis. The story moves forward, filling the pages compactly with emotion: love and loss, against the rich backdrop of the well-appointed pension and the baroness' confident seductions.

“The Walk” presents us with a middle-aged wife who is unable to articulate her unhappiness. Instead, she prepares for a passive-aggressive war with her husband and his financially rewarding but spiritually empty career, a war which she seems certain to win.

A Google search for Joy T. Dayrit sadly yields no news about new literary work. However, the inclusion of "A Bedtime Art Story" in Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo's critical essay (www.panitikan.com.ph/criticism/newtalesforold.htm), "New Tales for Old," is a reassuring sign that Dayrit's writing has resonated and weighed in with established and more productive Filipino authors. It is my fervent hope that more of her work will reach a wider audience in the near future.

Thanks, dizzydame. Am extending the deadline to January 15. The more, the manyer. :)

OK, here's my ulterior motive for asking for reviews: I want books written by Filipinos to have more content on LibraryThing, and that would work if we added reviews to each book page.

I noticed you put the review here and added a member review to the book in question. That's great, kahit the link to the member review suffices.

I'm glad you have that intention, micketymoc. I'm all for promoting good Filipino literature, too.

What a commendable gesture, micketymoc. What a way to spread good will this season.
Like most of us on PinoyThing!, I, too, am all for the expansion of searchable Philippine literature in terms titles, know how, popularity and entries. I believe that our LibraryThing contributions, no matter how small but by no means insignificant, will help in the increased awareness of our culture and help put Philippine literature forward in the community of accessible online literature. (I hope my entry on uploaded covers will help others' OPAC in fulfilling this end.)
#5 dizzydame, Joy T. Dayrit has also published poems back in the early 80s, if I am not mistaken. I will let you guys know when I get hold of some titles.
Cheers and good luck to all entrants.

so . . .

did anybody win?

aznstarlette,
micketymoc extended the deadline to Jan. 15, 2008 (see #6). You still have time to submit :)

wow completely missed that. thanks!!

aznstarlette,
||micketymoc extended the deadline to Jan. 15, 2008 (see #6). You still have time to submit :)||
|||wow completely missed that. thanks!!|||
Re: submission comment: I know you probably don't need the extra year's membership, but there is some thrill in undergoing a process as this. I would've loved to join if it were not for my sched. Like you, I hope to read other reviews after dizzydame's. :) Cheers.

...and yet only dizzydame has sent in hers! What's the matter with everyone! Waaah!

Blood for Blood Pangayaw: The Right To Kill by Pio Gabad Arce

A Manobo Cheiftain named Buaya is performing Pangayaw or vendetta killing. In this contemporary suspense, Pangayaw may be culturally sanctioned but the Philippine Government is not about to sit and watch the Davao River flowing with blood.

Buaya is a tragic villain. His childhood is littered with deaths. Someone declared a Pangayaw on his fahter eliminating his mother and his father’s mistress. The tragedy did not stop there for the other tribe killed his cheiftain uncle and everyone else in his family. His hatred for Man-Okil, the man from the other tribe who started the trouble, makes him obsessed with the ritual killing. Buaya’s Pangayaw demands he kill Man-Okil, all his relatives and anyone who stands in the way. The government sends fresh graduate Romeo Del Rosario. If this soldier fails, the government will use him as a scapegroat. Del Rosario on the other hand will not let that happen. He graduated Cum Laude for a reason. Even when his comrades don’t follow his lead, he still goes by the book. But whatever it takes, he must capture Buaya.

Enter another character in the story who will change Buaya’s life for better or worse. Apino Banayao graduated in a Manobo Bible School as a pastor and was sent to Gumitan to set-up a pastorage. He meets and nurses the injured Buaya. Buaya listens to the Pastor and his family in singing and teaching about the bible unfortunately the call to kill brings him back to the jungle and there, all the characters go down in one big showdown.

In the end, Buaya surreneders himself to the Pastor and asks to be killed. The Pastor, hurt from loosing his son to Buaya, greives but forgives Buaya. The killing was over. Liutenant Del Rosario cuffs Buaya and takes him away.

Set in the warn and dense jungle of Southern Mindanao, the books vividly describes the scenes and the horrors each character experiences. Buaya’s life was filled with blood from childhood to adulthood. It took someone to declare Pangayaw and the other party would retaliate. Each party retaliates until the cycle becomes a blackhole ruining everyone and everything in its path. Even the innocent are not spared. Arce’s Blood for Blood shows this cycle in Buaya. This action filled book is a must in Philippine Literature.

Sana ito makahabol sa contest....

I wrote this 2005 and I realized how long ago that was. Groyon's Sky Over Dimas is still on of my top Pinoy reads. So, here is my review:

"Skyflakes Over Dimas"

It was perhaps a month ago when I finally got hold of Vicente Groyon's novel, The Sky Over Dimas. This novel won the 2002 Carlos Palanca Award for Literary Excellence in the English novel genre. Prestigious it may seem, this piece of work is virtually non-existent in major bookstores like National, Goodwill and Powerbooks. The only place one can get a hold of it is from the DLSU Press, and it's subject to availability. Nevertheless, this book deserves a bright place in the hall of fame of great Philippine novels in English along with the works of Nick Joaquin, Sionil Jose and Manuel Arguilla.

One word to describe Groyon's novel is this: GRIPPING. Like a good pulp fiction cum saga, the author managed to spin a huge entagling web of subplots, family skeletons and sketches of the decadent lifestyles of Bacolod. If you are from Bacolod, get this book! The language used in the book is masterful with great command of English, the words lyrical that it rolls in your tongue when you read it aloud, and the flow of his work GRIPPING. It is sentences like this which makes your mind heady with meaty delicious descriptions of Negros life: "He lunged, parried, thrust, and touch‚d through the smokers' arbor, harvesting white blossoms and leaves from the canopy of vines along the way." You cannot help but finish his novel in one sitting. You just have to find out what happened in the hacienda.

According to PDI contributor, Rosario Lucero wrote, "The novel's basic plot is a rescue mission that Negros haciendera Margie Jarabas Torrecarrion calls on her son Rafael to undertake. George, Margie's loony husband and therefore Rafael's father, has been holed up with a worker's daughter in the abandoned manor of Hacienda Dimas for three months now. It's the only kind of reason that would make Rafael, now living in Manila, break his resolve never to set foot in Negros ever again. He dutifully returns to Bacolod, spends a night there before driving to the hacienda located a few hours from the city, and takes his father back in an ambulance."

What happened in between is the meat of the novel. Groyon concocted a vast melange of high-strung free-wheeling Bacolod characters both from the Jarabas and the Torrecarion family trees with their haciendero lifestyles to the sacadas who cannot rise above their station due to the oppression of their masters. Most characters satirize the pretentiousness, superficiality, greed and clannishness of Negros society that is a class unto its own. Everything is laid out exposed under the garish light of public scrutiny- that under that veneer of aristocratic gentility lies wickedness (e.g. enough jelousy to commit murder just to cover up a an infidelity), insanity (e.g. going to a religious store just to shoplift cheap plastic medallions) and hypocrisy (e.g. whole Bacolod society gossips behind the family's back.)

Well, that's much like the Bacolod that I know. Still wicked, insane and the best hypocritical community one will ever know. But the good thing is, Groyon managed to encapsulate (but not distill) all the good and bad of my city into one gripping novel. As my friend one said, "Bacolod is a big city with a small town mentality." And how right he is.

http://idiotboard.blogspot.com/2005/04/skyflakes-over-dimas.html

After much deliberation, I've decided to award the free membership to dizzydame.

All the submitted entries were good, but I thought that dizzydame's was the best-written of the lot (as a writer myself, I can't help but be swayed by that). I don't have any consolation prizes to give away, so let's give the entrants a big round of applause!