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The quiet one7/30/2023 I developed a renewed and chastised relationship with the city after reading the novel. Happy to find someone who can get me to see a different perspective. Many thought processes and emotions were explained rather than showed. However, I found that the novel needed a better editor. If the intention was to communicate the feelings of a Filipino amidst the phenomenon of the business process outsourcing industry, this story succeeds - I felt both frenzy from the many cultural references, and existential dread wondering where this entire business would take me. Do you know how it is when a friend tells you a personal story chock-full of details which you can't get yourself interested about? I'm not sure where the author wanted to take this story. Set in modern day Manila, the novel is an observationally dense story of Alvin's direction in life - and the lives of his colleagues, mother, sisters, boyfriend, and others. The Quiet Ones is about call center agent Alvin who finds himself involved in scamming his employer of tens of thousands of dollars. Here’s to supporting more Filipino authors and reading more Filipiniana this year.✊□✊□✊□ And to read the details of a place I myself have seen and experienced, a place I can call my own, its grime and slime, and the people that make up my beautiful city, was cathartic. I’ve mostly read books describing foreign places I’m not sentimental with. Written so simply but poetically, you wouldn’t care about the plotlessness of the book anymore.īut what I really loved about this the book was the author’s lovely description of Metro Manila. It was genius how the author subtly talked about these topics through mundane stories.īut I think the book was most brilliant when it told stories of silent placelessness and loneliness: being rich but alone, unarticulated and articulated goodbyes, the possibilities and impossibilities between lovers, ex lovers, not-really-lovers. The book also tackled big topics like capitalism and post-colonialism condensed and simplified through the lives and experiences of the characters. And he had told them beautifully, I can’t help but gush over his prose. Of PH history, and its effects in the present. Glenn Diaz just wanted to tell stories: Of people, and their relationships. But really, fuck the plot when you have these lyrical, well-constructed sentences in front of you. I started this book with zero idea what it was all about, and the blurb and plotline were deceiving, so I initially thought it was a suspense/thriller novel. The book is 384 pages, so it's best to start reading as soon as you can. Ten pages that prove how much of a talented hoe Glenn Diaz is. Note the ending of the chapter entitled SHOOTING, which appears towards the middle of the book, and manages to humanize a peripheral character, explore the falling-out of a college romance, and deal with the national history of armed struggle in ten pages. The meandering nature of its narrative could easily be mistaken for messiness or a lack of direction - if it weren't for Diaz's sparkling writing, which packs humor and tenderness, and centuries of colonial/personal baggage in a single scene, sometimes a single line. It excels both as a piece of fiction and as a remarkable text for the social sciences, by rendering visible the cages rendered invisible by the totalizing processes of global capital. But Diaz unleashes even better literary pyrotechnics to make you stay: scintillating prose that, with Drag Queen-like versatility, shifts from time periods to settings to characters to expose the beating heart at the center of each one of its scrappy characters. THE QUIET ONES lures you in with a pitch and an opening scene straight from a crime-thriller, or from a really good game of Clue - a man with a black bag at the airport, trying to escape from the police.
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