In Caroline Hau's book, the fictional island of Banwa lies under the shadow of Mt. Photograph by Troy Squillaci on Pexels. Culture Review: Caroline Hau's 'Tiempo Muerto' speaks to our authoritarian time In the debut novel of the short fiction writer, profound inequalities are shown poignantly as is the universal search for love, loss, purpose, and belonging. Its two protagonists find a part of themselves as well as the hope for a new future. Hau's debut novel is her own version of what Nick Joaquin would call Tropical Gothic.
Photograph from Ateneo Press. Majority of the book's plot is set in sugar plantations and a huge ancestral home. Sa pamaraan ng dalubhasang paggamit ng wikang Ingles at Kanluranang mga tekniko sa pagsulat, nakapaglikha si Caroline Hau ng isang mahalaga at napaka-Filipinong nobela na mahalagang pagisipan at pagmunimunihan.
Kasamaang Ipinamana: ang mga kasalanan ng mga ninuno natin ay ang magmumulto sa atin sa huli, kung hindi natin pinagaralan at nilagpasan. They endure, they remember. The gifts of other people's stories become my gifts in turn, stories I will pass onto others, so that we may not forget.
Such an expansive world, yet we cross mountains and seas in order to gain our footing, solid and true against the wind and rain, on the ground we tread and the ground we will have trodden. I found her style in essays verbose but without ever losing sight of her arguments and points in the entirety of the content. For her first ever novel Tiempo Muerto, she almost applied this same kind of approach, which to me enabled her prose to breathe in some places yet also lose air in others.
The novel had also undergone what I believe to be thorough and credible research pertaining to key events based on real-life people and situations which, for the sake of creative license, Professor Hau had merely allusioned to rather than specify.
Tiempo Muerto can be read as historical fiction in scope because of this, and there are even a few of the underlying themes which delved on Philippine politics and its systematic corruption and abuse of power, particularly among aristocrat families who engage in nepotism and unethical policies to this day.
Before that meaty portion of the narrative was explored, Tiempo Muerto is first and foremost a character study about two women.
The premise of the story concerned their starkly distinct lives from one another yet some of these experiences and struggles tend to overlap nevertheless. We have Racel, an overseas Filipino worker who had to go home because her mother Nanay Alma disappeared and no one knows the circumstances surrounding it.
Over several years, Racel and her mother have grown distant, almost like strangers to one another, so in her personal mission to understand what happened and where the old woman could have gone, she uncovered certain details that she was never told in the obligatory letters they had exchanged, like any parent and grown daughter would do. Interestingly enough, her chapters are written in first-person whereas the other heroine of this novel is in third-person.
This small discrepancy didn't take away anything, because both POVs worked within the limits of the perspective offered. Lia Agalon, the other side of the coin, was a wealthy heiress from a famed family in the Philippines, sired by a glamorous socialite who married a man who was as crooked as one can expect a prominent figure in business and politics to be. When the book started, Lia just got divorced from her Singaporean husband and also estranged from her only daughter Natasha.
Looking for an anchor and harbor, she returned to the Philippines. She, too, has a stake in the missing Nanay Alma. Lia and Racel somewhat grew up together since Rachel's mother was Lia's caretaker. Their relationship can be considered sisterly, but as they soon found their footing in two worlds that were never supposed to meet, the women might as well be acquaintances who merely shared a few memories about the town of Banwa--and the secrets and strife which engulfed its people and self-appointed vassals.
The thought that she might be dead has a way of reshaping people's memories and the stories they tell. They're intricately designed cloths while mine is plain and monochrome. The prose's tone fits that quite well especially when the story not only expounded on family genealogy, crises, and interconnected histories, but it also created this semi-paranormal layer concerning ghosts, whether real or imagined.
The old Agalon house was established from the beginning as a haunted place, and several scenes hinted that Racel and Lia's ghosts are hardly just symbolic. We never truly learn, and perhaps it never mattered.
What was so engaging about this book was how Hau took her sweet, laborious time fleshing out the two women as individuals, and made readers care about their woes, secret fantasies and most of all their memories from childhood that were at once bittersweet and incontestably traumatic.
Both were survivors of hardships that spanned across decades and woven into Banwa's own rich history in which it endured the colonial times, the Commonwealth era including World War II and Martial Law.
Racel had a very engrossing chapter where in she recounted her fragmented memories about Marcos time where her favorite teacher was 'salvaged'. Later on she would also reveal the first and perhaps even the last time she and her mother shared something horrific that it deepened their filial bond.
Even though Racel felt most real and recognizable in the things she endured as someone who worked hard to bring herself out of poverty, it's ultimately Lia whom I considered warmer and more sympathetic, even in her moments of self-defeat and pitiful choices. That's not to say I cast aspersions on Racel; I don't believe anyone can for there is steel in her bones and ice in her veins, but Lia's story appealed to me more mainly because she came from a place of privilege and was therefore burdened by the compliance she cannot seem to fully free herself from.
Now an adult woman who has faced the music regarding a lot of her choices in life, Lia was bound to come home to the country she's been sent away from because her father can afford it. In America she fell in love and made most of her freedom, but she's also a person who merely grew to love her chains, and the story of Tiempo Muerto was the great unraveling in which she must trace where those chains come from.
While Racel came to terms that she never truly lived beyond her duty as a good daughter and provider so she must find happiness defined more by her heart and not just pragmatism, Lia had willfully allowed her destiny dictated by the whims of people who never saw her anything more than just an extension of their legacy and pride, and now it's time to take control. Now I find myself reeling new colored threads onto their spools, and the thought that other designs are possible scares me as much as it excites me.
Let the ghosts colonize Banwa. She would join them in a different project of haunting. She would atone for her sins, or the sins of her family, knowing that the understanding she sought was not the same as the rationalization and justification, much less forgiveness. She would start by calling her daughter.
The ending for Tiempo Muerto can be taken as evasive or ambiguous, although I'd like to think that the journey was what counted more rather than any destination, because it didn't feel to me as if the story was truly over for Racel and Lia, hence that last scene. I enjoyed everything about this novel in ways I never expected; I commend Professor Hau for the leisurely time she took so she can offer a very nuanced portrait of her characters, two women who came from differing economic backgrounds and personal experiences.
The best moments of the novel came from the historical fiction it was penned in. Hau never dropped names explicitly, but I can make educated guesses about certain figures in politics that she based a few of the circumstantial characters from. On the downside, I was left with a few questions in between readings during my almost four-month stint, and sometimes most of the chapters seemed too indulgent in content for the sake of character study, but I actually am a fan of rigorous exploration of characters, so this didn't bother me.
Overall, Tiempo Muerto was an impressive feat and a welcome addition to contemporary Filipino fiction. Sep 06, Jodesz rated it it was amazing. We knew what it was like, year after year, to walk the purgatory between life and death. Racel is an overseas Filipino worker in Singapore who goes home to the feudal island of Banwa to find her missing mother, the long-time helper of the Agalon family.
I love how the characters were written. The two characters Lia and Racel often bleed into each other, even if the only thing they shared was their childhood. At the same time, it feels like they are in this never-ending tug of war game, with neither unwilling to yield during their stay inside the old Agalon house.
Rich with details that mirror reality, it reads like an ethnographic paper on many areas in the Philippines scarred by centuries of feudalism and the violence that inevitability comes with it. Banwa, the sugarlandia of the Agalons, might as well be Negros, or Tarlac, or even Sitio San Roque in Quezon City, which says so much about Philippine society and its penchant for firmly holding on what should be basic necessities from those who worked hard.
Halfway through, I was curious whether the Agalon house is really haunted. Aug 22, Astrid rated it it was amazing. Tiempo Muerto is a story of two women, both searching for a person and for their place in this world.
But more than that, i "Such an expansive world, yet we cross mountains and seas in order to gain our footing, solid and true against the wind and rain, on the ground we tread and the ground we will have trodden. But more than that, it is a story of class divide, revolution, and land reform.
Feb 27, Ralph rated it really liked it. Oo, giit ng Tiempo Muerto, hinuhubog tayo ng dugo at ng kasaysayan. May mayayabong na lilim ang nakaraan, mga punong malalalim ang ugat na hindi natin matatakasan. Subalit ano ngayon?
Bagaman sumusunod sa hubog na inilalatag ng nakaraan ang ating mga buhay, lagi't laging may pagkakataong baliin ang inaakalang tadhana. Tungkol ang Tiempo Muerto sa nagbabanggaang kasaysayan ng dalawang babae, sina Lia at Racel, na minsang nagsalo sa pagkabata sa isang pulong binabalikan nila ngayon matapos ang mga Oo, giit ng Tiempo Muerto, hinuhubog tayo ng dugo at ng kasaysayan.
Tungkol ang Tiempo Muerto sa nagbabanggaang kasaysayan ng dalawang babae, sina Lia at Racel, na minsang nagsalo sa pagkabata sa isang pulong binabalikan nila ngayon matapos ang mga buhay na puno ng dahas at kabiguan. Sa pamamagitan nitong kuwento tungkol sa mga nawawalang ina, may malinaw na sipat ang libro tungkol sa karanasan ng mga migranteng Pilipino at may matibay ring pagpoposisyon hinggil sa politikang humuhubog sa tadhanang pangingibang-bayan ng napakarami sa ating mga kababayan.
Bagaman nakulangan ako sa pagtatahi ng kuwento ni Lia, buong-buo rito ang salaysay ni Racel, na siyang hinala kong totoong bida sa kuwento. Mataginting ang tinig ni Hau sa nobelang ito.
Napakadaling basahin ng mga talatang tatangayin ka mula Singapura hanggang Amerika pabalik sa kanayunan ng Panay habang naghahabi ng isang salaysay ng mga paglayo at pagmamahal. Mabagal mag-alab ang kuwento subalit tiyak na malululong ka sa gilas ng pagkukuwento. Sep 13, Kiko rated it it was amazing. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. Description Two women meet on the island where they shared a childhood. Tags fbm20 literature women fiction Philippines.
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