Perhaps you prefer to go old-school, where hemovores are concerned? Good news, then, because for this last Wednesday of October, our Featured Book Character is Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula.
With the proliferation of candle-lit cemeteries, store-bought Halloween costumes and horror movie marathons this time of the year, there is no better moment to revisit fond memories of the Transylvanian tyrant, a monarch in the realm of our favorite nightmares.
In the 1897 Stoker novel, Dracula is an enigmatic, dangerous (duh!) and vengeful character who leaves his castle and travels to Victorian England. If you’ve seen the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola film adaptation of the book, all you need to do is subtract the saccharine elements (too much romance!) and you are left with a portrait of how ominous and fascinating Dracula is, with his fictional arsenal including transfiguration (shape-shifting), hypnotism, gravity-proof wall-climbing, teleportation, beyond-steroids strength, raising more undead, and even ‘aristocratic charm’.
An archetype, Count Dracula is a literary creation that would spawn on paper other generations of blood drinkers. He has popularized the unnerving predatory capacity to exact one’s existence from the destruction or consumption of another. He is a ‘repackaging’ of the ultimate parasite, one whose nature has been cloaked with power and mystery.
What does it reveal, this human propensity towards the crafting of glorified monsters?
“Despair has its own calms.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula
This second Wednesday of October, our Featured Book Character is she who has portrayed one of the strongest and most vivid portraits of restrained power, in the world of fantasy woven by J.R.R. Tolkien.
She is the Lady of Lothlórien; her name is Galadriel.
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Galadriel belongs to the highest of the Elves, in terms of physical stature and bloodline, her being both distinctively tall and hailing from Noldor origins. She is the daughter of Finarfin, and grandmother of the fair Arwen (Galadriel’s daughter, Celebrian, has married legendary Elrond of Rivendell). “Galadriel” is a Sindarin (an elvish language) name for “maiden crowned with a radiant garland”.
Everything about her – from her hair, to her eyes (“the wells of deep memory”), to her gifts (a mallorn seed for Sam, a phial of Eärendil’s light for Frodo, among others), to her insistence that sketchy Saruman not head the White Council, to her proclamations of “we have fought the long defeat” – drips with luminescence and wisdom.
She wears one of the great Three Rings, Nenya, also known as the Ring of the Adamant. A white stone set in finest mithril, it appears as a star resting on her fingers to ordinary eyes; it slows time’s passing and has guarded her realm against the reach of that ophthalmological nightmare of a villain, Sauron. (LOTR fans know who wear the other two Celebrimbor-made rings: Varya is with Gandalf, Vilya is with Elrond.)
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In one of the most memorable scenes depicted in both the Peter Jackson film and the book, Frodo Baggins, the hobbit protagonist, offers Galadriel the One Ring, which she declines. Placed in the context of her ceding all that she loves so a new age may come upon Middle-Earth, readers come to the understanding that it is not so much what she is refusing as much as that which she is actually embracing with determined courage – how she will fade, along with her land and all her people – that makes her choice all the more compelling. She assists the Fellowship in its quest to vanquish Sauron, even if it meant destroying a force which is so intertwined with her own. With a characteristic mastery of self, she demonstrates how power is not an undying monopoly of the mighty, how certain things must be allowed to slip away.
With relief and quiet pride, in the departing light of an unimaginably-lucrative opportunity she has just considered and rejected, she has remarked:
‘I pass the test’, she said. ‘I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.’
Isn’t that just classy and grand? How many of us could rightly say something of the same?
“Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.”
Gifted with words, José de Sousa Saramago wandered about, trying out a host of other social roles – mechanic, civil servant, production manager at a publishing company, editor, literary critic – before puncturing a three-decade balloon (by getting fired!) and releasing his fiction out into the world. He had grown up in poverty – every spring, his mother would reportedly pawn out their blankets, in the hopes of redeeming them before the next winter – and came to be known for his stances against globalization and the oppressive nature of governments.
The Portuguese is the UPOU Book Club’s Featured Author this week, as we all watch September and its historical footnotes flicker quietly across our social media universe.
Saramago, who died at age 87, has been described in many ways: a “militant atheist”, an “unfaltering Communist”, someone “both an avant-gardist and a traditionalist”, a “radical”, the “son of landless peasants”, a “connoisseur of ironies”, and a “voice of European skepticism”. But among the many identifiers and accolades, there is one (coming from his translator) that any writer would dream of – he has been called a “complete original”.
When he won the 1998 Nobel Prize for Literature, he recalled his grandparents:
“In winter when the cold of the night grew to the point of freezing the water in the pots inside the house, they went to the sty and fetched the weaklings among the piglets, taking them to their bed. Under the coarse blankets, the warmth from the humans saved the little animals from freezing and rescued them from certain death. Although the two were kindly people, it was not a compassionate soul that prompted them to act in that way: what concerned them, without sentimentalism or rhetoric, was to protect their daily bread, as is natural for people who, to maintain their life, have not learnt to think more than is needful.”
This “sardonic peasant pragmatism” has been Saramago’s ticket to literary immortality. His works are peppered with the tensions between what is real and what is not real, and to taste them in works like Baltasar and Blimunda, The Stone Raft, Seeing and Blindness is to be reminded that, yes, not all things have been written about.
Saramago also plays with religious themes, and does so in a way that is utterly captivating, if not shaking, as one can find in The Gospel According to Christ or Cain. He recreates scenes in a manner that makes a reader thankful there are writers – with eyes utterly their own – drifting from and through the world.
The next time you pass by any of his books in a store or a shelf, crack it open to the first page and peek for a quick read. Oh, commas have never looked more beautiful.
This week, the UPOU Book Club invites you to read Angelo Suárez. Here is one of his poems, written and published before he turned 20 years old:
FLOOD
We have become estranged, you and I, as the stars no longer find the asphalt-gray of streets, the somnolent moon your skin, the sun the sibilance of speech. How we tremble now at the slightest hint of touch, the latch of our desires reopening like a wound
Watch me now as I say: In September’s resolute rains, you are water – fragments descending as drops from Manila’s urban sky. Thus, you are everywhere, dripping down walls and sliding off roofs, filling every crease of road and crevice of soil. And on the rise of flood
floats the carcass of memory, taking the muddied form of muck, filthy plastic bags, venomous piss of rat. In this metropolitan marsh where nothing is left but a squalid sight of swamps, soggy lampposts, the third-world remnants of a storm, I dip my hands and dream of fish.
An agent of conceptualist writing (“conceptualist and performative poetics”), Angelo Suárez has some of his other stuff on Lulu (www.lulu.com) where one can toss them into a shopping cart for free. These works include Circuit: The Blurb Project, Maliit lang ‘yung sa ‘yo, itabi mo, magpadaan ka: Adventures in Parataxis, Poem of Diminishing Poeticity, and Ariane: a stock epic. He also has another poetry collection, Else It Was Purely Girls, which has been a balm to those seeking more of the wordplays of the Tomasino.
It is lovely to stalk him a few full moons a year, by checking out his FB account where, apart from posting selfies with books, he wages word wars against the MRT, the Philippine PPP program and the notion of Nora Aunor as an artist. For all his accomplishments (Palanca, UNESCO Bridges of Struga International Poetry Prize, etcetera), he tethers himself to our dusty reality by sporting a beard, bringing his kid to punk gigs and occasionally demonstrating a love for canned tuna and craft beer.
What else is there to be said? Seeing pining young poets grow up, and seeing them do so with such conviction, one finds hairy dollops of hope in the world.
Almost fifteen years ago, while eating beneath some golden arches, a bespectacled (and dimpled) boy named Erwin introduced me to the perils of fanaticism. He spoke so enthusiastically of a literary bandwagon rolling across children’s shelves abroad that, just to stop him from waving his fries around, I agreed to hop on. He handed me one of the famous books, the second title of a series, which told of three students in search of a monster lurking in a Chamber of Secrets.
I finished it in one night. Greedy girl that I was, I immediately borrowed the rest of the books. No hour or threat of horrible punishment could divert my attention from them; the fourth one, The Goblet of Fire, was even recklessly read during class and while crossing Taft Avenue (honking cars be damned, it’s not like they were cool and could fly and be invisible anyway).
Someone’s love charm definitely Exceeded Expectations. A spell had hit me right in the heart.
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To say how, from that day onwards, the eternal child in me became irretrievably lost in the dazzling (and terrifically magical) world of, yes, Harry Potter, would be to belabor the obvious. But I am nothing if not a fan of the extravagant (and redundant) capabilities of the written word, so allow me to continue my adulation…
There is something very attractive about a brain that can think up thestrals, Horcruxes and moving staircases, isn’t there? And frankly, a writer who can manufacture an awe-filled world (equal parts anguish and hope, fit for the consumption of children), is the kind of person we might (ought to) want walking around, inflicting her output (for lack of a better word) upon a world whose Muggles have forgotten the basics and could not even spare innocent babies onboard an airplane.
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So here you have her, bibliophiles: She who gave us Luna Lovegood, the Weasley twins, Dobby and Mad-Eye Moody; who thought up Tentacula pods, Quidditch and butterbeer; who famously journeyed on trains to write, starting the ride as an unemployed single mother and finding a way to being a veritable member of fiction royalty.
This week, as inevitably as Filipinos braving typhoons (and as resolutely as a politician denying culpable violation of the Constitution), our Featured Book Author section finally shines a wand light upon She-Who-Must-Be-Named:
J.K. Rowling
Joanne Kathleen, or Jo, is also She-Who-Has-Been-Reviled, notably by religious zealots and literati snobs, the former for writing about magic (witchcraft?), the latter for sheer cheek of gaining commercial success (“popular” and “elite” are hardly on friendly terms). Most Potterheads shoo away these judgments for being the Wrackspurts they actually are.
For all her detractors’ grumblings, J.K. Rowling remains a portrait of the ideal, a human being who has achieved a lasting legacy and has provided something “aspirational” and inspiring. She is a jewel of Britain and one of the most beloved authors alive. She is also the only writer to have ever made the billionaire list of Forbes (basing on income before taxes, apparently).
She has written seven Harry Potter books, three HP supplementary books (Quidditch Through the Ages, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, The Tales of Beedle the Bard), plus The Casual Vacancy and The Cuckoo’s Calling (non-HP books, one surreptitiously published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith).
Recently, she has published a Rita Skeeter article that electrified millions of fans and caused an official fan site to crash. Evidently there’s no need to look into the Mirror of Erised to know that legions wouldn’t mind reading another series… The life of Neville Longbottom, perhaps? *gives a nudge to the ‘Queen’*
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Readers, especially those who wait for wide-eyed-wonder moments, will definitely have spaces reserved for children’s books. Without a doubt, Rowling’s HPs have irrevocably claimed some of mine.
If like me you’re hanging on for more Dumbledore’s Army updates, I wish you the best and the merriest as you relive the memories and imagine the fates of our favorite wizards and witches!
![[J.K. Rowling photo has been grabbed from Nina Limardo's blog, via www.specificfeeds.com]](https://theupoubookclub.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/jkrowling.jpg)
The UPOU Book Club 