Advanced
Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
Title details for The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic by Nick Joaquin - Available

The Woman Who Had Two Navels and Tales of the Tropical Gothic

by Nick Joaquin
Gina Apostol
ebook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Read a sample Read a sample
1 of 1 copy available
Celebrating the centennial of his birth, the first-ever U.S. publication of Philippine writer Nick Joaquin’s seminal works, with a foreword by PEN/Open Book Award–winner Gina Apostol
A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice
 
Nick Joaquin is widely considered one of the greatest Filipino writers, but he has remained little-known outside his home country despite writing in English. Set amid the ruins of Manila devastated by World War II, his stories are steeped in the post-colonial anguish and hopes of his era and resonate with the ironic perspectives on colonial history of Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa. His work meditates on the questions and challenges of the Filipino individual’s new freedom after a long history of colonialism, exploring folklore, centuries-old Catholic rites, the Spanish colonial past, magical realism, and baroque splendor and excess. This collection features his best-known story, “The Woman Who Had Two Navels,” centered on Philippine emigrants living in Hong Kong and later expanded into a novel, the much-anthologized stories “May Day Eve” and “The Summer Solstice” and a canonic play, A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino. As Penguin Classics previously launched his countryman Jose Rizal to a wide audience, now Joaquin will find new readers with the first American collection of his work.
 
Introduction and Suggestions for Further Reading by Vicente L. Rafael
 
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 18, 2017

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781524704544
      • File size: 938 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781524704544
      • File size: 938 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      March 15, 2017
      A collection of short stories and a play by Joaquin (1917-2004), one of the Philippines' leading writers in English, who finds passion and melodrama in the nation's colonial and Catholic history.The first story, -Three Generations,- tells of a young man who defies his father first by choosing the priesthood over a law career and then by reuniting his pining grandfather with a young woman. It hints at the -tropical gothic- of the title but is more conventional than most of the collection. Ghosts, saints, and visions are common as Joaquin (Gotita de Dragon and Other Stories, 2014, etc.) moves among folklore, legend, and even some sci-fi. In -Candido's Apocalypse,- a teenage boy alienated from his family and life in general begins to see people without clothing and then without flesh. In an entertaining quasi-mystery that begins with a crucial toothbrush (-The Order of Melkizedek-), siblings' efforts to rescue their sister from a cult center on a Rasputin-like figure who reappears over many centuries. In -The Summer Solstice,- a religious festival's wild dancing turns one woman into a sort of a pagan queen in her husband's bemused eyes. One of the two navels may not exist in the tortuous, episodic title story as it shifts between Hong Kong and Manila and touches on exile, failed revolution, WWII, and Filipinos' uncommon musical gifts. The play that closes the collection (-A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino-) shows two spinster sisters trying to hold on to a once-vibrant and grand old house. Their survival may depend on selling their father's final work of art, a painting of Aeneas carrying his father, Anchises, from the ruins of Troy. The drama is rich in themes but rather dreary and heavy-handed. Steeped in Filipino history and culture, Joaquin's work is a welcome discovery.

      COPYRIGHT(2017) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Loading