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While The Women Are Sleeping by Javier Marias, Php865 at National Bookstores.

Bored. Must…reach…book.

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For three weeks, I saw them every day, and now I don’t know what has become of them. I’ll probably never see them again—at least, not her. Summer conversations, and even confidences, rarely lead anywhere.

I nearly always saw them at the beach, where it’s difficult to get a good look at people. Especially so for me, because I’m nearsighted and would rather see everything through a haze than return to Madrid with a kind of white mask on my otherwise perfectly tanned face, and I never wear my contact lenses when I go to the beach or into the sea, where they might be lost forever. Nevertheless, I was tempted to rummage around in the bag in which my wife, Luisa, keeps my glasses case—well, the temptation came from her, really, because she, if I may put it this way, was constantly transmitting to me the more peculiar activities of the more peculiar bathers around us.

Read While the Women Are Sleeping by Javier Marias.

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We were going to ignore the new Dan Brown release as we have no intention of reading it, but MMDA Chair Tolentino has just made it sound interesting.

Thanks for the free book publicity–anything that makes people read.

No thanks for speaking for everyone and making us sound like flaming idiots!

Read the MMDA’s official denial that Manila is the hellmouth.

Illustration by Ricky Villabona. Made with Procreate for iPad.

From his new novel, All That Is.

Made with the Sigil Creator.

We didn’t want to interrupt our obsessing with Game of Thrones to write a column on current events, so we did both. Sigil first, column coming up at InterAksyon.com.

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Politics in the Philippines is a family business, emphasis on ‘business’. People take it up as a career, ostensibly because they want to serve their country, but what really happens is, they get rich. Which is not to imply that they got into politics for the money, but there it is. Hell, we’re not even saying that the newly-elected senators are lousy because face it, we have insufficient data to generate a conclusion. This doesn’t mean we think highly of them, either, but it would be great if they could prove us wrong.

So the politicians get rich, and we’ll assume that they acquire their wealth through honest means besides their comparatively low salaries. Anything with such a high rate of return, be it food preparation, art or optometry, will become a business, and in our culture business is best done with family. Politics is no different. Of course you want your children to go into the business, it worked so well for you. In retro-feudal democracies like ours, that’s the reason you have children: to carry on the family name business.

Take the Lannisters in Game of Thrones, the addictive HBO series based on George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy cycle, A Song of Ice and Fire. The Lannisters are the wealthiest, most powerful family in Westeros. In the era preceding the TV series, the patriarch Tywin Lannister is the Hand of the King (like the prime minister) to Aerys II of the Targaryen dynasty…

Read our column at InterAksyon.

John Lanchester, author of Capital, reviewed A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin and HBO’s Game of Thrones last month in the London Review of Books. Good to see that journal of literary and intellectual essays give fantasy novels their due. The article is here. If you have not read the first three volumes or started watching Season 3, DO NOT READ IT. (But you will, won’t you hahahahaaa.)

Everyone is addicted, and everyone reports the same moment as being the one that got them hooked…The king and his entourage take up residence at Winterfell, ancestral home of the Starks. We see much of their antics from the perspective of Bran Stark, second-youngest son of Eddard, a likeable, lively eight-year-old boy. Bran’s hobby is climbing all over the huge high rambling castle of Winterfell, something he does with an enthusiasm which would be reckless if it weren’t for his complete confidence that he will never fall. In the course of one of his climbs, he hears adult voices through a high window, goes to investigate, and comes across Jaime and Cersei energetically engaged in (to use a neologism popular with fans) twincest. They catch him catching them at it, and Jaime grabs Bran. The two twins look at each other. ‘The things I do for love,’ says Jaime – and throws the boy out the window.

That startling moment is where the first programme in the TV series ends, and it’s the point at which people realise they’re addicted.

Also, its strongest characters are women. Catelyn, Cersei, Daenerys, Arya, Brienne, Margaery, Olenna Tyrell, even Sansa has learned how to live in that world.

Lady Olenna Tyrell on her grandson Loras. From the Lady Olenna tumblr.

We had to turn to our friend, an original Leo fan club member gone apostate, and whisper, “Break na kayo ni Channing Tatum, ano?” Photo from the Hollywood Reporter

Not gaudily sublime or sublimely gaudy, but gaudy and sublime.

In the first half-hour we didn’t know whether to stay or go. Then Leonardo DiCaprio appeared in the most ridiculous movie star introduction in memory, and the movie was on.

Of course the 21st century soundtrack produced by Jay-Z is entirely appropriate: his music is about climbing, money and power. Don’t forget that Gatsby is the story of a very successful social climber.

We couldn’t wait to review the movie so we wrote this over dinner.

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Those extravagant character introductions follow Scott Fitzgerald’s explicit stage directions.

Daisy’s introduction:

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-colored space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew threw the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding cake of the ceiling—and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.

The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as it they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.

from We Can’t Hear the Mime!

Gatsby’s

He smiled understandingly—much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced—or seemed to face—the whole external world for an instant, and the concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just as far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished—and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd.

from Business Insider

With the release of the new film adaptation of Gatsby by Baz Luhrmann, bookstores have been stocking up on F. Scott Fitzgerald books. Penguin Modern Classics, inc. the box set of Fitzgerald’s novels, available at National Bookstores.

First time we read The Great Gatsby in high school, we were dazzled by the glamour. New York in the Jazz Age, champagne fountains, beautiful people staying up till dawn.

The next time we read it we were beguiled by the romance: the poor boy who does everything for the love of a rich girl.

In college we gained from it the understanding Gatsby never got: Dreams and reality are two different things entirely.

When we read it again, we were floored by the language, its beauty and eternal wistfulness. Afterwards we read it as a criticism of the American Dream.

These days we see Gatsby as the tale of a romantic fool who pursues a dream, only to find that it’s not worth it. All the hard work of reinventing himself, and for what. And yet he IS great, because he had the power of his convictions, even if they were a fool’s convictions, and the courage to become what he wanted to be. He is better than his dream.