Source：lazada.com.ph
Caroline HauTiempo Muerto₱445
Caroline Hau
₱445Tiempo Muerto
Tiempo Muerto was a book my director asked me to read in preparation for a film we were about to do together. I was mainly very excited about the fact that some parts of it were set in my hometown, Iloilo. It was very cool to find places from my childhood on the pages of a book I was readingーthis wasn't something we non-Manileños were used to.
It didn't take long before I found myself drawn into this story about the return of two women from entirely different realities. Racel is an Overseas Filipino Worker from Singapore who comes home to search for her mother, Nanay Alma, who has gone missing after a massive typhoon. Lia, an heiress from the prominent and questionable Agalon family, looks to escape the fallout of her messy divorce and flies back to the Philippines.
Upon discovering the news about her yaya, she, too, sets out for the island of Banwa where both women are eventually reunited. This homecoming forces them to reckon with the ghosts that haunt them as they unearth family secrets and old woes. Though both characters are separate in their struggles, they still end up circling back to the woman who raised them.
It's impossible to tell a story about family and privilege without acknowledging the Philippines' wealth disparity and deep-seated history of systemic corruption and impunity, and Caroline S. Hau delves right in as she expertly weaves all these themes together with her extensive researchーshe even touches on Philippine mythology and folklore.
I enjoyed this novel so much despite me not wanting it to end where it did. It's also been a while since I've read contemporary Filipino fiction, and this book was a delightful reminder of what I was missing out on.
It didn't take long before I found myself drawn into this story about the return of two women from entirely different realities. Racel is an Overseas Filipino Worker from Singapore who comes home to search for her mother, Nanay Alma, who has gone missing after a massive typhoon. Lia, an heiress from the prominent and questionable Agalon family, looks to escape the fallout of her messy divorce and flies back to the Philippines.
Upon discovering the news about her yaya, she, too, sets out for the island of Banwa where both women are eventually reunited. This homecoming forces them to reckon with the ghosts that haunt them as they unearth family secrets and old woes. Though both characters are separate in their struggles, they still end up circling back to the woman who raised them.
It's impossible to tell a story about family and privilege without acknowledging the Philippines' wealth disparity and deep-seated history of systemic corruption and impunity, and Caroline S. Hau delves right in as she expertly weaves all these themes together with her extensive researchーshe even touches on Philippine mythology and folklore.
I enjoyed this novel so much despite me not wanting it to end where it did. It's also been a while since I've read contemporary Filipino fiction, and this book was a delightful reminder of what I was missing out on.