The anatomy of a novel

In a jiu-jitsu move worthy of the book distributor, my novel, Riverrun, will be available in the whole world not just on Kindle but also on paperback. Amazon.com websites in Australia, the UK and the US have picked the paperback version of the novel for global distribution. Let me continue the Q-and-A I had with Elaine Chiew of the Asian Books Blog regarding my novel.

EC: Politics also threads through the book, the American military presence, the Marcos regime, but in such a way the book feels political without being overtly political. Was this an important balance for you?

DR: I went to the university at the tail end of the Marcos dictatorship. We were reading the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and the poems of Pablo Neruda. When I first read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” I was stunned. You can write a novel like this? This is like the Philippines. His novel sounded like the folk tales my grandmother told me, or the supernatural stories that our housemaid narrated to us before we went to sleep. But interleaved with these are scenes of political enemies being thrown off the train, into rivers and ravines. I lived in a mountainous suburb outside Manila, and sometimes I would see headless bodies dumped beside the highway, or men with hands bound with barbed wire floating on the river.

And Pablo Neruda! He wrote a poem where he compared a military dictatorship to a beast trapped in quicksand, trying to rise again and again. These powerful images shaped me. They told me, in my waking life and in my dreams, that I can tell seemingly light stories, turning here and there like the lobes of a seashell, but there will be echoes, the whisper of sinister truths. By the way, I also wrote an additional 75 pages for the international version of this novel; the slimmer Philippine edition was published in 2015.

EC: Buried in the book are recipes for kinunut (which involves cooking with shark meat) as well as bopis (which utilises pig’s heart and lungs – a funny recount of how the butcher in London assumed it was scraps for the dog, I loved that), and I wondered if you really intended for readers to experiment with the recipes. Whether or not one does so, what function does a recipe serve in a novel for you?

DR: The recipes function the way a Greek chorus does in drama. They comment on the novel, again, in an elliptical manner. Shark preys on people, but here, the poor Filipinos are the ones preying on the predator. In an indirect way, I think it’s a commentary on power. The bopis anecdote came from my professor in Philosophy, Rayvi Sunico, who took a post-graduate degree on the History of Ideas at the University of Sussex. That was a true story and he gave me permission to put it in my novel. I also put it there as a commentary on how poor you are as a graduate student, whether in the UK or in the USA. Most of my scholarship stipend went to books, and when there was something else left, then I bought food. I worked as a pizza parlor cashier when I studied in the US. Every summer, I also walked the dogs of the rich at Central Park. These will show up in my next novel. The recipes are real and kitchen-tested; the readers can try them, if they want.

EC: What was the most enjoyable part to write in this novel and, by contrast, what was the hardest?

DR: The parts that flowed like water was the first part, the childhood scenes. Some of them are autobiographical; others are cobbled together from the experiences of various people. When I was a young boy, I was always surrounded by older people. When they wanted to talk about unmentionable topics like sex and scandals, they would talk in Bikol, my parents’ language, which I completely understand! I don’t like to speak that language because my accent is bad, but I remember the juicy morsels that they talked about – and most of that went to the novel. The difficult part was the political scenes. I have around 20 books on the Marcos military dictatorship and I read all of them. I also lived through that difficult and painful period in my country’s history. When I was at the university, the only thing we wanted was to leave the country; the taste of ashes was in our tongues. But what to put in my novel? How to sieve so it does not end up as dry propaganda, where People Power happened and life supposedly became happy ever after? In the end, I chose the stories that I heard. Stories, talk, whispers, conversations – they never fail you.

EC: How has the pandemic affected you either in (1) book promotions or (2) your daily writing practice or career, and what ways are you finding to cope?

DR: My novel was supposed to be published in April, and the pandemic delayed that. That gave us time to proofread the novel better, because there are always nits to pick here and there. I wrote a comprehensive outline for my second novel during the lockdown in Malaysia. I have written around 10,000 words and I still need to write around 50,000 words. The setting is the USA, and Danilo Cruz goes there to study and to work.

I just returned to Manila a month ago. All of my work here is done online – I teach Literature at San Beda University, one of the oldest and the best universities in the Philippines; I have an online school where I do tutorials in English and Creative Writing; and I am building my YouTube Channel as well, so I shoot three videos every week. Please subscribe to the Danton Remoto YouTube Channel. I also began Aries Books, where I will publish the electronic editions of my books of essays and poems, in English and Filipino. The world, as Riverrun reminds us, does not stop even if that wicked virus is still with us. Life continues to reveal to us a world that, to quote Matthew Arnold in “Dover Beach,” is still “so various, so beautiful and so new.”

Comments can be sent to  [email protected] Website www.dantonremoto.com “Riverrun, A Novel” is available in amazon.com