The Story Continues

This is where it gets bloody.

So: I've finished reading the first issue of Story Philippines and though the first three stories of the magazine were top-notch, the others were a bit uneven. Of course, like all reviews, these are just my opinion and should be taken cum grano salis. After all, most of the writers involved in this magazine are award-winners or published authors. And considering how small the local literary community is, I'd probably get shafted for being critical. Who am I to criticize, right? Still, this is just my honest opinion as a reader and one should take it as it is...

Anyway, I never really got into the next story, Joy Dayrit's metafiction "Allen and Borges: A Dream," but I could appreciate anything involving Jorge Luis Borge. Actually, I admit the fault in appreciation lies within me since I've never seen Woody Allen's stuff (except for Mighty Aphrodite and a short in the movie New York Stories) nor read much of Borge's fiction (though I do know Borge is well-known for his metafictional approach) and Dayrit obviously riffs a lot from their work. Still, despite my handicap, what's not to like about the idea of imagining Borge and Allen sitting in a cafe and chatting-- and nothing but that?

However, I thought the next story, Nicolas Lacson's "The Best Mayor We Ever Had" lacked a certain profundity despite the story being cast in the social realistic mode. I found the story of a driver/bodyguard of a mayor who had just passed away and how he deals with his boss' last request with his wife had potential, given our country's obsession with the culture of personality. Unfortunately, I felt the characters were rather two-dimensional: for example, I never empathized with the angry wife as her motivation escaped me. This, after an intense build-up of the story, hindered the ending for me and made me ask "That was it?"

On a third hand, I liked the idea behind Francezca Kwe's "Siesta." Another realism story, this one was about two children and how they managed to retain their innocence in the face of a world that sullies anything that it touches. Funny enough, Kwe does a good job trying to convey the children's sense of wonder at seeing the grotesqueness (how Kwe describes it to the readers) of the sex act for the first time. Aside from that, I don't have much to comment about it.

Lastly, I had high hopes for Vincent Sales' "The Forgotten City", which given the title and my penchant for liking city-themed stories, shouldn't have been that hard to raise. This may have been too much to bear as I will inevitably compare his story of a fabled city called Sun Girna Ginar to, say, Kevin Brockmeier's short story The Brief History of the Dead or Angelica Gorodisher's unearthly tales of Kalpa Imperial or even something within similar lines, Dean Alfar's fantastical piece L'Aquilone du Estrellas. To be really honest, I really wanted to like this spec fic piece. Unfortunately, Sales' fabulist approach was sorely checked by his not-so scintillating prose-- something that any writer would have to careful about if ever they would use this method-- and at the word go, was already badly knee-capped.

Overall though, I thought Story Phillippines had a strong first outing despite my disinclinations over a couple of stories and will be avidly checking out their succeeding issues. Here's hoping they last as long as that long-running outlet for fiction submissions, Philippine Free Press.