Happy Tuesday everyone! As it is Tuesday, it is time for a Top Ten Tuesday update. Top Ten Tuesday is an original blog meme created by The Broke and the Bookish and is currently being hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl.
This week’s given topic: Books on My Summer 2023 to-Read List
Title: Marcosatubig
Author: Ramon Muzones
Translator: Ma. Cecilia Locsin-Nava
Publisher: Ateneo de Manila University Press
Publishing Date: 2012
No. of Pages: 220
Synopsis:
Ramon L. Muzones claims his rightful place in the national literature of the Philippines with Cecilia Locsin-Nava’s English translation of Margosatubig, a Hiligaynon novel that was to re-write the history of the West Visayan fiction when it first appeared as a serial novel in 1946 in the pages of the popular magazine Yuhum. Muzones tells the story of a fictive Muslim state in Mindanao that loses its legitimate rulers through intrigue and treachery and how the hero-heir Salagunting leads the struggle to recover Margosatubig from the usurpers. Muzones shows himself a master of narrative invention in 30 installments that unfold a wealth of precolonial lore that blended romance, adventure, fantasy, subtle eroticism, and geographic information that so fascinated magazine readers and made Yuhum‘s weekly circulation jump from 2,500 to 37,000.
Dr. Nava’s is a wonder-work of an English translation, literate and literary, a rare, readable English version of a regional literary treasure. It is a lucid, unornamented rendition of the original Yuhum novel that manages quite effectively to suggest the delicious sensation of following the development, chapter by chapter, of the serialized popular novel. Through her labors, she has effectively secured for Muzones a position in the line-up for the title National Artist for Literature.
Title: The Preying Birds
Author: Amado V. Hernandez
Translator (from Tagalog): Danton Remoto
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Publishing Date: 2022 (1969)
No. of Pages: 434
Synopsis:
A novel that continues the flaming social realism in the novels of the Philippine national hero, Dr. Jose Rizal.
Mando Plaridel is the lead character in this novel of social realism. His character combines the qualities found in Simoun and Ibarra, the two lead characters in national hero Jose Rizal’s novels: Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. Simoun is the passive character in Rizal’s novels while Ibarra is the active propagandist who wakes up the people from their centuries-old sleep under Spanish colonialism.
Mando starts out as Andoy, a houseboy in the house of the powerful Montero family. He works hard and gets himself a good education. After the war, society begins to know him as the brave editor of the Kampilan newspaper. He later becomes involved in the problems of the farmers with the abusive Monteros.
Told from an omniscient point of view, Hernandez is able to enter the consciousness of the wealthy characters. He shows how the ruling classes – the politicians, landowners, judges, deputies and bishops – only protect their own interests, that is why they do not want to change the status quo.
Dr. Sabio is the progressive president of a university founded by Mando, who used the treasure thrown into the sea at the end of Rizal’s second novel to help improve society. The money is used to fund Freedom University and set up Kampilan, the brave newspaper. The novel points to the cooperative system of land ownership as the way out for the landless poor. It implies that change can only begin when the eyes of society have been finally opened.
Title: Violets
Author: Kyung-Sook Shin
Translator (from Korean): Anton Hur
Publisher: The Feminist Press
Publishing Date: 2022 (2021)
No. of Pages: 212
Synopsis:
San is twenty-two and alone when she happens upon a job at a flower shop in Seoul’s bustling city center. Haunted by childhood rejection, she stumbles through life – painfully vulnerable stifled, and unsure. She barely registers to others, especially by the ruthless standards of 1990s South Korea.
Over the course of one hazy, volatile summer, San meets a curious cast of characters: the nonspeaking shop owner, a brash coworker, kind farmers, and aggressive customers. Fueled by a quiet desperation to jump-start her life, she plunges headfirst into obsession with a passing magazine photographer.
In Violets, best-selling author Kyung-Sook Shin explores misogyny, erasure, and repressed desire, as San desperately searches for both autonomy and attachment in the unforgiving reality of contemporary Korean society.
Title: Three Daughters of Eve
Author: Elif Shafak
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Publishing Date: 2017
No. of Pages: 367
Synopsis:
They were the most unlikely of friends. Three young women with utterly different worldviews. They were the Sinner, the Believer and the Confused.
Peri, a married, wealthy, beautiful Turkish woman, is on her way to a dinner party at a seaside mansion in Istanbul when a beggar snatches her handbag. As she wrestles to get it back, a photograph falls to the ground – an old Polaroid of three young women and their university professor. A relic from a past – and a love – Peri has tried desperately to forget.
Three Daughters of Eve is set over an evening in contemporary Istanbul, as Peri arrives at the party and navigates the tensions that simmer in this crossroads country between East and West, religious and secular, rich and poor. Over the course of the dinner, and amidst an opulence that is surely ill-begotten, terrorist attacks occur across the city. Competing in Peri’s mind, however, are the memories invoked by her almost-lost Polaroid, of the time years earlier when she was sent abroad for the first time to attend Oxford University. As a young woman there, she had become friends with the charming, adventurous Shirin, a fully assimilated Iranian girl, and Mona, a devout Egyptian American. Their arguments about Islam and feminism find focus in the charismatic but controversial Professor Azur, who teaches divinity but in unorthodox ways. As the terrorist attacks come ever closer, Peri is moved to recall the scandal that tore them all apart.
Elif Shafak is a bestselling novelist in her native Turkey, and her work is translated and celebrated around the world. In Three Daughters of Eve, she has given us a rich and moving story that humanizes and personalizes one of the most profound sea changes of the modern world.
Title: The Noodle Maker
Author: Ma Jian
Translator (from Chinese): Flora Drew
Publisher: Picador
Publishing Date: 2004
No. of Pages: 181
Synopsis:
Two men meet for dinner each week. Over the course of these drunken evenings, one man, a writer, recounts the stories he would write, had he the courage: a young man buys an old kiln and opens a private crematorium, delighting in his ability to harass the corpses of police officers and Party secretaries, while swooning to banned Western music; a heartbroken actress performs a public suicide by stepping into the jaws of a wild tiger, watched nonchalantly by her ex-lover. Extraordinary characters inspire him, their lives pulled and pummeled by fate and politics, as of they were balls of dough in the hands of an all-powerful noodle maker.
Ma Jian’s satirical masterpiece allows us a humorous yet profound glimpse of those struggling to survive under a system that dictates their every move.
Title: Man Tiger
Author: Eka Kurniawan
Translator: Labodalih Sembiring
Publisher: Verso
Publishing Date: 2015
No. of Pages: 172
Synopsis:
A wry, affecting tale set in a small town on the Indonesian coast, Man Tiger tells the story of two interlinked and tormented families and of Margio, a young man ordinary in all particulars except that he conceals within himself a supernatural female white tiger. the inequities and betrayals of family life coalesce around and torment this magical being. An explosive act of violence follows, and its mysterious cause is unraveled as events progress toward a heartbreaking revelation.
Lyrical and bawdy, experimental and political, this extraordinary novel announces the arrival of a powerful new voice on the global literary stage.
Title: The Story of a Goat
Author: Perumal Murugan
Translator (from Tamil): N. Kalyan Raman
Publisher: Black Cat
Publishing Date: December 2019
No. of Pages: 178
Synopsis:
In his brilliant new novel, Perumal Murugan paints a bucolic portrait of the rural lives of India’s farming community through the story of a helpless young animal. A farmer in Tamil Nadu, South India, is watching the sun set over his village one evening when a giant man appears on the horizon. He offers the farmer a goat kid who is the runt of the litter, surely too frail to survive. The farmer and his wife take care of the young she-goat, whom they name Poonachi, and soon the little goat is gaining strength and even bounding with joy. But Poonachi’s life is not destined to be a rural idyll – dangers lurk around every corner, and sometimes come from surprising places, including a government that is supposed to protect the weak. A beautiful portrait of the natural world that also examines hierarchies of caste and color, The Story of a Goat is a lyrical fable from a world-class storyteller.
Title: The House Without Windows
Author: Nadia Hashimi
Publisher: William Morrow
Publishing Date: 2016
No. of Pages: 412
Synopsis:
For most of her life, Zeba has lived quietly in an Afghan village, a loyal wife and loving mother. But on one horrific day, her family’s world is shattered when her husband, Kamal, is found brutally murdered with a hatchet in the courtyard of their home. Covered in blood and catatonic with shock, Zeba refuses to explain what happened. Barely escaping a vengeful mob, she is sent to Kabul’s Chil Mahtab, a women’s prison.
As Zeba awaits trial, she befriends other women whose own misfortunes have led them to these bleak cells: Nafisa, imprisoned to protect her from an honor killing; Latifa, a runaway who stays in the jail because it is a safe haven; and Mezhgan, pregnant and unmarried, jailed for zina, or “love crimes.” The women whisper among themselves: Is Zeba really a cold-blooded killer? Has she truly inherited her mother’s power of jadu – witchcraft – which can bend fate to her will? Can she save herself? Or them?
Into this closed world comes Yusuf, Zeba’s Afghan-born, American-raised lawyer, whose desire to help his homeland has brought him back. With the fate of this seemingly ordinary housewife in his hands, Yusuf discovers that, like Afghanistan itself, his client may not be at all what he imagines.
Title: A Horse Walks Into A Bar
Author: David Grossman
Translator (from Hebrew): Jessica Cohen
Publisher: Vintage
Publishing Date: 2017
No. of Pages: 198
Synopsis:
A comedy club in a small Israeli town. An audience has come expecting an evening of amusement. Instead they see a comedian falling apart on stage; an act of disintegration, a man crumbling, as a matter of choice, before their eyes. Dovaleh G, a veteran stand-up comic, charming, erratic, repellent – exposes a wound he has been living with for years: a fateful and gruesome choice he had to make between the two people who were dearest to him.
Flaying alive both himself and the people watching him, Dov provokes revulsion and empathy from an audience that doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry – and all this in the presence of a former childhood friend who is trying to understand why he’s been summoned to this performance.
Title: The Good Muslim
Author: Tahmima Anam
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publishing Date: 2011
No. of Pages: 297
Synopsis:
In the dying days of a brutal civil war in Bangladesh, Sohail Haque stumbles upon an abandoned building. Inside he finds a young woman whose story will haunt him for a lifetime to come.
Almost a decade later, Sohail’s sister, Maya, returns home after a long absence to find her beloved brother transformed. While Maya has stuck to her revolutionary ideals, Sohail has shunned his old life to become a charismatic religious leader. And when Sohail decides to send his son to a madrasa, the conflict between brother and sister comes to a devastating climax.
The Good Muslim is an epi about faith, family, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the long shadow of war from prizewinning Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam.
The Pine-Scented Chronicles 