PALH BOOK REVIEWS

 

A NORMAL LIFE AND OTHER STORIES by Reine Arcache Melvin published 1999 by Office of Research and Publications, School of Arts and Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University Review by Gregorio C. Brilliantes

The best of Reine Arcache Melvin's stories (Eclipse' being the most brilliant) are absolutely marvelous - in the same class as Philippine classics of the genre like Joaquin's "Three Generations" and Madrid's "Southern Harvest," and in certain ways even their superior. For she penetrates with more credible skill and cunning, it seems to me, into the habitual abnormalities of the heart and the unnatural dark holes of the soul - and of society - than any one of her predecessor and her own generation. At once passionate and pitiless, fervid as a lover's tongue yet cold and gleaming as the scalpel that would slice into it, her fiction is stunning and astounding the first time, burned permanently into the memory the second. Almost as if the sensibilities of Joyce Carol Oates, Ian McEwan and Kerima Polotan had been reborn and transfigured in this superbly endowed original born in Manila, bred in Makati, come to her majority in Montparnasse.

 

 

 

 

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