Gege Cruz Sugue

It is like no other I’ve read before. It starts off with an eerie tone, like those horror films masquerading as documentary works, a mad blur of fact and fiction, reminding me of The Blair Witch Project or Paranormal Activity. But that’s only at the start.

It is about a House, a strange House, mysterious, breathing, growing by itself, sprouting rooms and tunnels that exceed the dimensions of the house, sucking human beings to their death. 

It’s about people–broken, afraid, drawn into the story of the House, willingly or not. 

I can’t say much about it really without giving away the surprises. 

One of the most unusual things about it is its form. And I do not have the literary jargon to explain it. It’s a nesting novel–3 stories, a story within a story within a story, bound by parallelisms in some parts and in some parts, you wonder why they’re even told adjacently. Some parts make sense. And some parts make me utter WTF. 

It’s weird. It’s scary. It’s perplexing. It’s 

just



different. 

You really have to read it to know what it’s about. 

All I can write about now is what it said to me. Its message.

I heard it telling me that:

As people struggling with or against or despite our brokenness, we tend to look outward for the fix. We seek solutions from the world–in the realm of politics religion, science. We try to find answers from others. And we seek consolation from the externals–achievement, work, social acceptance, romantic involvements, thinking that whatever wounds we nurse inside could be cured by medicines from the outside. After all, whatever has caused those wounds inside came from the outside as well–we can only blame these external upheavals for breaking us. 

Pretty much like how people blame the House for the horrors and chaos it has caused on those cursed enough to enter it. 

But all of these upheavals–the shifting, the falling, the evil, the horrors are just frames that move to shake us, stir us, agitate us. They happen just to push us to look within ourselves, to find the persons we were or the persons we want to be, to hear the voice we want to hear but cannot or have not. 

It’s not about the outside world after all. It’s not about the House after all. The answers come from within. The healing starts inside. 

That was the message for me. Which is really useless information for you because I’m pretty sure that in the same way that House meant something different for each of its occupants, this book would mean something else for you, and every other reader.

Did I like it?

Yes.

Because it’s clever. Because some parts made me gasp. Some parts made me ache. Some parts made me cry. Some parts made me put the book down to catch my breath. 

It made some of my book club mates dizzy.

It made us flip pages to find out what happens next. 

And it made all of us wonder. Ask questions. 

It agitated us. 

I like it because of the love story, or rather love stories it contains. 

I like it because it transformed me from being just a passive reader to somebody part of the drama as I read it, made lines on it, wrote notes on it, turned it around,  smothered its pages, almost hurled it out of fear and exasperation, crumpled its cover, molested it, and found parts of me reflected by its characters. 

I love it because the form is part of the message. Very Mc Luhanesque with the medium being the massage. 

Some pages are filled to the margins. And some are almost empty. And that there is a logic to that. It might seem gimmicky to others, but it works for me. This form brought me deep into the the dark tunnels of the House. And I love that. 

I like how it is rich in plot and description. But I love it even more because it manages to delve deeply into the characters–their personalities, their backgrounds and motivations, and for most of them, their neuroses. No character is too minor not to be given its voice, its story. 

I love this part when one of the characters had to read the book in the dark and he only had one page  and one match to go. I felt what the character felt. The movie in my head looked so real, I saw the cinema audience gasp and clap along with me. 

I love how it honors the printed book. No electronic medium could really do justice to this story. Maybe an interactive ebook or a website could top the reading experience with technological wizardry, but it just cannot give that wondrous thrill of turning the crispy pages in various paces.

And I love the sex scene on page 89. I mean who writes sex scenes like that? Who talks like that? Who uses and weaves words like that?

I love and hate that many of our questions about the book will never get answered.

So read it. You might love it. Or you might hate it. But you probably would want to talk about it. 

Then buzz me if you want to talk about it. Because I don’t want to stop thinking about this book just yet.

I have a problem.

I will be co-moderating a book discussion in a few days. And I’m not prepared.

And those who know me in our book club will snicker and think I’m just pretending. That I’m just lowering expectations while I prepare to whip up a surprise production number.

   

You see, in our book club, Flips Flipping Pages, we tend to over-prepare. In the colloquial, kina-career. When I’m moderating, I tend to get obsessive about expanding the reading experience. First I read the book, most likely a book I’ve already read before. A book I’m championing because I love it. Or a book that intrigues me, haunts me, a book that fucked my brain so hard that it bled, and I will die if I don’t talk about it.

I would take my moderation job seriously. I take copious notes and highlight like crazy. I research to find interesting facts about the author, the work, the genre. I Google, er, think of thought-provoking questions. And then I fantasize about the venue, how it should be thematic—to bring the reader back to the book. Even the food has to go with the theme. And then the loot bags! Oh, the loot bags! We stop short of wearing costumes. Oh wait. We don’t.

But for this particular book, I’m not doing any of that. I just cannot muster enough enthusiasm.

It’s the first time I’m moderating a book that I haven’t read previously. This is because we agreed early last year that we would discuss a Wild Card.

In our book club, we decide on the line-up for a full year the previous year. (We have already decided on the 2015 line-up months ago.) That means that we do not get to accommodate new publications.

Last year, we decided to live on the edge. (We book-lovers are such a thrill-seeking bunch!) We assigned September for the Wild Card—a book published in 2014. We took an online poll right after the first semester and this book emerged as the popular vote.

Interestingly, we’re having the discussion with The Filipino Group, one of the most active book clubs in the country. And they chose the same book. It must be really good.  

To make a long story short, I’m not wild about our Wild Card book. There! I said it. I cannot get excited about it. That’s what I mean about being unprepared. After chasing one of the few copies, I read it early August. I’m supposed to read it again this week for a deeper understanding. But I do not have the heart, nor the energy to do so. I choose to clean layers of dust and rearrange my monster of a closet to avoid reading this book. And now, its details have wafted to the nebula of forgetfulness. 

I only realized now how important it is to feel strongly about a book. You need those emotions—whether it’s love, hate, passion, revulsion—to fuel you to champion a book and to prepare for the content and the logistics of a book discussion.

There’s a lot to love about the book, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin. It’s one of those books that a friend of mine might read then would send me a note to highly recommend it to me. She/he might say, “I thought of you while reading the book. It’s so you.” It’s a book about books—that always gets me lusting over a book. Even better, it’s a book about a bookstore. Heavens! Drool.

The story was nice. Really nice. Super nice. At the end, it was just that. Nice. It makes you say Awww. How sweet. And that bookstore on an island–how quaint. It’s a feel-good kind of book. But when I finished reading the book, there were two words that summarized my experience—Hallmark Channel. It is a Hallmark Channel kind of book. Hallmark Channel shows are not all that bad for me. But they are shows that I can watch while doing something else like sorting my files, repairing jewelry, semi-napping, reading a book like this one.

Look, I’m a reader who lists Robert Fulghum as one of her favorite authors. So I’m not one to automatically deride books with a Chicken Soup for the Soul feel. Not every book has to be edgy. But this book just failed to get under my skin, despite all the good things going for it. All the time while I was reading it, there was a charming classical music soundtrack playing in my head. No, not Puccini or Beethoven, the kind of classical music played fortissimo. But the kind of classical music played while you’re rubbing a dab of butter onto your dinner roll as you giggle politely in a fine dining restaurant. Boring, borderline annoying muzak.

Do I hate the book? Not at all. And therein lies the problem. We don’t always have to love the book. Hate is good too. Hate drives me to insult the author, accuse her/him of sleeping with the publisher, and passionately list down all the vile, idiotic things that make the book suck. Hating a book makes for an interesting discussion. I love it when I hate a book.

But I don’t hate it. Like I said, there’s a lot to love about the book. It cites literary pieces that I also love or would be interested to read. It has some great lines that resonated with me.

There are amusing bits that poke fun at book clubs. It touches on some emotional elements that interest me–death, marriage, adoption. And the love story is really kind of sweet. I don’t hate it. I just mildly dislike it. Or mildly like it. Whatever.

The problem is I feel guilty for disliking it because so many people seem to love it. And it feels sacrilegious for a book club founder to dislike this book that seems to pander to book lovers.  

There is a part in the book that could have saved it for me. One of the characters is stricken with a disease that affects the brain. The character’s mental faculties degenerate slowly. Note that this is a sensitive area for me, having lost a sister to brain cancer. So I braced myself to get emotional. But the narrator ends it abruptly, conveniently kills the character, skipping over the parts that could have gotten under my skin. Maybe she didn’t want to go there. But I felt I had to go there to feel something for this book. Maybe I’m masochistic.

Okay, my book club mates know that I’m easy to please, really. If a book makes me cry, then it redeems itself. It becomes worth it.

Oh—that’s the real issue, I guess. I paid 1,148 friggin pesos for a book that did not hit me in the gut or the heart. It barely skimmed the surface of my ultra-sensitive skin. And it does not even have pretty pictures. So fine. That’s the problem. I felt robbed. And now, I don’t just dislike it anymore. I hate it. Now, I’m ready for the discussion.