Book Review of Cecilia Brainard’s Selected Short Stories

BOOK REVIEW:Selected Short Sto­ries by Cecil­ia Manguer­ra Brainard

Pub­lished by the Uni­ver­si­ty of San­to Tomas Pub­lish­ing House (2021; avail­able at Laza­da & Shopee

and PALH (2021); avail­able at Ama­zon 

Review by Jen­ny Ortuoste

From “Short Sto­ries to Lull You on Rainy Days” (Mani­la Stan­dard, Lifestyle , 7/30/22)

 https://manilastandard.net/lifestyle/314247900/short-stories-to-lull-you-on-rainy-days.html

In these sto­ries writ­ten and pub­lished over sev­er­al decades, Brainard, a native of Cebu who migrat­ed to the U.S. over half a cen­tu­ry ago, explores her life expe­ri­ences as a Fil­ipino and Fil­ipino Amer­i­can, as well as the entan­gled his­to­ry of both countries

This col­lec­tion of 39 sto­ries is grouped into three sec­tions: Part 1 is set in her fic­tion­al world of Ubec, which mir­rors Cebu; Part 2 is locat­ed in Mani­la, Vigan, Saga­da, and Negros Ori­en­tal; Part 3 is set in Paris, the U.S., and oth­er parts of the world.

 

Some of the sto­ries are inter­twined and make me won­der, what if they had been expand­ed into a nov­el-of-sto­ries? Part 1’s “Woman with Horns,” “Trinidad’s Brooch,” and “The Balete Tree” are sto­ries that fea­ture the same char­ac­ters but focus­ing on a dif­fer­ent one each time, giv­ing wide and res­o­nant per­spec­tives of the lives of the peo­ple in that time and community.

 

In Part 2, the lush details of “Vigan” and “The Rice Field” bring to life an ancient town and old ways of liv­ing amid the Mar­cos era. From the lat­ter, it’s infor­ma­tion like this, scat­tered through­out the sto­ries in this book, that brings tra­di­tion alive:

“…she led me to the kitchen where she took out an antique cop­per choco­late pot. She rum­maged in the cup­board for choco­late tablets…made from the fat­test cocoa beans.[…] She melt­ed the choco­late, whipped in fresh milk and sug­ar, and she poured two cups…” Doesn’t this remind you of the “choco­late eh, choco­late ah” pas­sage in Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tan­gere? What a com­fort­ing thing to read on a rainy day.

 

Brainard’s deft han­dling of human emo­tion and respons­es to events and peo­ple is appar­ent in these sto­ries that are like time machines as they are set in dif­fer­ent peri­ods of Philip­pine his­to­ry, from the Span­ish colo­nial to World War II and after. Most­ly thread­ed through with themes of love and long­ing, they end with a melan­choly coda that leaves a bit­ter­sweet taste.

 

Well-writ­ten and hyp­not­ic, these tales are a grand dis­play of Brainard’s sto­ry­telling and word-weav­ing skills that only get bet­ter with time.

For com­ments and feed­back, you may reach the author on Face­book and Twit­ter: @DrJennyO

Tags: Fil­ipino short sto­ries, Fil­ipino lit­er­a­ture, Fil­ipino books, Philip­pine books, Philip­pine short sto­ries, Filipiniana