2025 - 002 Booknotes | On ‘All My Lonely Island’ by V. J. Campilan
Reader’s Note:
I want to pay tribute to the books I’ve read without raving or ranting. I also want to stay away from performing a book review. My solution? Booknotes. A blog post with a brief introduction proceeded by a collection of book quotes I called tender juicy meaty parts. These gems don’t have to be nuggets of wisdom. They can be captivating arrangement of words, dramatic questions, passages that capture the human condition, or funny dialogues. You can say these are the words I would badly wish I am the OG writer.
But that’s how nostalgia is: a slow dance in a large circle. — Isabel Allende
I picked up the line above from Allende’s memoir My Invented Country. The words and wisdom so brilliant it was eternally embedded in my mind. Allende continued and said, memories don’t organized themselves chronologically, they’re like smoke, changing ephemeral, and if they are not written down they fade into oblivion.
If nostalgia is a slow dance in a large circle, the lead character, Crisanta, in the novel All My Lonely Island by V. J. Campilan has a different take. She said that memories are all narrow trails, most of them leading to dead ends. I also find this very intriguing.
Tender Juicy Meaty Parts
Writing, Redemption
When people have nowhere else to go but the edge of a cliff, they have few choices… And some, like me, sit down and write, because we are not brave enough to live or die. We try to manage burdens by delegating the weight to a word, transferring it to a blank piece of paper, squeezed into familiar letters and corralled by margins.
Words. Depending on what you believed, they’re either empty air or a prophecy that shall come to pass. We try to demystify ourselves through words, so we could dismantle our bones and rebuild ourselves into something less monstrous.
Guilt, Writing
I watch you sink into another life where there is no remembering. Some words have the power to resurrect but all I have are these that have managed to claw their way out, disheveled and emaciated. Look how they falter, their see-through shapes, the loose spaces between them. These words will not guarantee a rebirth. The minute I started writing them down, all I felt was methodological emptying. These letters, nothing but a wisp of someone’s hair you catch disappearing around the corner just as you were coming into view. Sometimes, I look at the back of my hands to see if I’m still solid. If I could enter these pages and not get lost, or die.
Writing
And come to think of it, writing is a kind of voodoo. You’re weaving a spell, most of backfiring on you, because you’re the one who’s ultimately lost in in your labyrinth.
Youth
No matter how many times the world trains you to grow up, you’re young when you’re young. We’re a little clumsy and more than graceless.
We are young. That’s not an excuse. It’s a context, and we apologize nonetheless.
Sacredness, Irony, Religion
How curious isn’t it, for one object to suddenly lose its power upon crossing territorial lines. This here ends your divinity, the border says. No more holy cows. In this Bengali soil, you are stripped of your ability to reincarnate. Here you are meat.
Memories, Nostalgia
Ah yes, running away. The entire world is large enough to accommodate two more fugitives. But memories are all narrow trails, most of them leading to dead ends.
Freedom
Wait until something is taken from you, something important, something you have put a lot of yourself into. You’d start wondering too, if people should be allowed to do things because they can.
Importance
Crisanta: Isn’t strange? How we could destroy each other for all these things that don’t matter in the end?
Ferdinand: It matters a lot at that moment. Everything matters a lot when you’re young.
Growing-up, Youth
When I kept to myself, they worried about my mental health. But when I started…hurting others, they slackened a bit. I think it was because I was now a measurable problem. Now I am officially a troubled child who was just expressing his confusion through violence. Suddenly I was explainable, you know?
Power, Domination
I felt the dryness in my mouth, my heart floundering from too much rush of blood. He had left the final decision to me, after all. He had left his fate to me. This is what it must have felt like for Stevan after he got Ferdinand suspended, this total control, the ability to impose upon another’s life so completely. God-mode. This is why Ferdinand transformed himself into a monster every day, for this kind of lonely power. I realized then what a hollow state it was to be in, because for everything you destroy, it adds nothing to you. It steals what’s left of the best in you.
Pride, Dignity
He told me once I was decent enough for the entire world. If he expected me to do right thing then, he was in for a rude awakening because I was going to sink spectacularly, lower than he did, lower than what he thought I’d have guts for.
Miracles, Aloneness
But what more can be said? In a world where you only get to have one measly vote, how do we summon a miracle?
Escapism
You must never betrayed yourself by running away.
Goodbyes, Memories, Nostalgia
Now I realize there can be no proper farewell, just lifetime of remembering.
Notes & References:
- Book - My Invented Country by Isabel Allende
- Book - All My Lonely Islands by V. J. Campilan