Merlinda Bobis is a Filipino-Australian author who grew up and went to university in the Bicol region of the Philippines before emigrating and completing a postgraduate degree in Australia. Banana Heart Summer is her debut novel, set in the Bicol region in the 1960s, and won her the Gintong Aklat Award (Golden Book Award, Philippines, 2006).

Banana Heart Summer is the story of 12 year old Nenita growing up in the lush, colourful surrounds, but also poverty and hardship, of Remedios Street. The narrator is Nenita’s older self recollecting this life. The writing is lyrical and extravagant and focuses on describing the mouthwatering cuisine all the way through. Nenita grows up hungry, both physically-with her 5 siblings and parents struggling to survive-but also emotionally. She spends her life trying to please and placate her angry, discontented mother and to win the crumbs of her affection. Nenita leaves school at twelve, and takes a job cooking and cleaning for the neighbours to help feed her hungry siblings. She pours herself into cooking, creating exquisite dishes. She sees food as a parallel for human emotions and behaviours. She intertwines food, local culture and myth to understand and make sense of the world around her, including the antics of her neighbours, their joys and their heartbreaks. Nana Dora shares her secrets with Nenita, especially the legend of the banana heart. "Close to midnight, when the heart bows from its stem, wait for its first dew. It will drop like a gem. Catch it with your tongue. When you eat the heart of the matter, you'll never grow hungry again."

As Nenita prepares her glorious dishes she learns about life. That, “pride is a sin, but dignity is a saviour,” that “desire is bigger than anything that can fill it. Desire is a house with infinite extensions.” And that, “Love on the rebound is always suspect. Perhaps because, on the rebound, passion may not have the projectile capacity of the first bounce.” We gain an insight into the foibles of her neighbours and a picture of the area, “we lived between the volcano and the church, between two gods. The smoking peak and the soaring cross faced each other in a perpetual stand-off, as if blocked for a duel.”

This is an exquisitely written book that is both visual and gustatory. There is not a great deal of plot or action but the insights into folktales, culture, cuisine and the complexity of human desires, more than makes up for this. I would highly recommend this book, but maybe don’t read on an empty stomach. ( )

A lyrical narrative of a girl growing up in the Philippines during an eventful summer for her and the people living on her street.

Merlinda Bobis now lives and writes in Australia, but she grew up in the Philippines and places much of her writing there. She is a poet and a novelist, probably best known for her impressive, multi-layered Fish-Hair Woman. This book, like her Solemn Lantern-Maker, (see my reviews) is a simpler story with much of the same fine writing.

Nenita, the narrator of Banana Heart Summer, is the oldest of six children of a family mired down in poverty. Her mother had left a well-to-do family when she fell in love with a stone mason. The summer that Nenita was twelve, her father was out of work and her mother pregnant again. Beaten by her angry mother, Nenita set out to earn money to feed her family, and to “please or appease” her mother. That summer all the people along her street are drawn in to life-changing events ranging from acts of love and despair to the eruption of the nearby the volcano.

As in her other books, Bobis blends the imaginary and symbolic with concrete bits of reality. Perpetually hungry, Nenita fills her story with recipes and descriptions of food. She gives us detailed accounts of various local dishes that she and others prepare. Her recipes are layered with comments about the impact different foods have on people and the need to balance love and anger, the heart and the spleen. Underneath the banana hearts and coconut milk, we see her own need not just for food, but for love.

I recommend this book enthusiastically to those who enjoy books of depth and whimsy.

Merlinda Bobis is a poet, and this book - a young girl's description of her street and neighbours in a small town in the Philippines - is a very poetic one.

It's full of symbolism - the street itself is described more than once as sitting between a church and a volcano, "between two gods. The smoking peak and the soaring cross faced each other in a perpetual stand-off, as if blocked for a duel".

If the volcano represents uncontrollable human passions, for most of the book you might think that it's not much of a competition. A young man elopes with his mother's greatest rival. The beauty of the street breaks several hearts. Nining (our narrator) nurses a crush on the son of the street's wealthiest family. "None of us could move before the perfect teeth at the other side. his preening and our ogling crossed and recrossed the road, and better sense was ambushed by hormones."

But the church is represented in smaller, darker ways, such as the shame the narrator's mother feels towards her first-born, the symbol of her romance with a labourer which got her thrown out of her wealthy family's house.

Nining gets a job as a maid and cook in a neighbour's house, and the majority of the book's symbolism is around food. Nearly every chapter heading is the name of a dish which features in the chapter, and nearly every person's story is told through references to food. Lovers give each other sweets, poor families argue over the price of a basic dish, a recluse lives self-sufficiently on the vegetables from his garden.

I know that this food-oriented magical-realist approach has been done many times before, and occasionally the symbolism was a little too obvious (when the handsome boy puts his hand on Nining's arm, she thinks, "Perhaps this is how fruit awakens to its ripening"). But I enjoyed the book a lot - and after all, it explains clearly how in a culture like the Philippines', food is tremendously symbolic of social relations and family circumstances; so why not make use of that with some mouth-watering writing?

My only real criticism is that although the book plays a lot with the idea of the contrast between heart and spleen (which medically is supposed to clean the blood, but symbolically represents anger), the writing is so lovely and charming that it's hard to realise the genuine pain in the relationship between Nining and her mother, until a rather shocking scene part-way through the book. But maybe next time I read the book it will come through more clearly. ( )

Very lyrical, you can tell the author is also a poet. I didn't know whether I should cry, laugh or eat while reading this. The tastes, smells and sounds leap off the pages and surround you - coconut, shrimp paste, palm sugar....

Melinda Bobis tells the haunting story of a twelve year old girl living in poverty in a small village in the Philippines. Nenita is a warm, loving girl who is abused by her mother. The mother married outside her class when she became pregnant with Nenita and resents the shame brought into her life. Nenita tries unsuccessfully to please her mother and win her love. She is always hungry and learns to cook from an old lady with a snack stand. Nenita equates cooking with showing love and the food and cooking descriptions are beautifully lyrical. Nenita befriends everyone in the neighborhood and learns the secrets and intricacies of adult life. Nenita is taken in as a maid by a wealthy family but continues to take food and money to her family. She finally stands up to her mother when she begins to abuse her brother, the oldest now that she has left. The story ends when she is invited to move to America with the daughter of the wealthy family to be her cook and maid.
This book is beautifully written. Nenita breaks your heart but never pities herself. She manages to see the beauty around her in spite of the pain and ugliness in her world. It's as if the beauty is more vibrant because of the pain, just as the sensation of taste is enhanced by hunger. I will definitely look for other works by this author. ( )