Merlinda Bobis

Merlinda Bobis is an award winning Filipina-Australian writer who these days hails from Canberra. A prolific author, she writes in Filipino and Bikol, and fortunately for us, also in English.

Amongst her Australian literary awards are

• 2018 Highly Commended in the ACT Book of the Year for her poetry collection, Accidents of Composition;


• 2016 Christina Stead Prize for Fiction NSW Premier's Literary Award for Locust Girl. A Lovesong, href="https://anzlitlovers.com/2015/10/22/locust-girl-by-merlinda-bobis/" rel="nofollow" target="_top">see my review;


• 2013 MUBA: Fish-Hair Woman, see a Sensational Snippet here;


• 2006 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for Banana Heart Summer; and


• 2000 Steele Rudd Award for the Best Published Collection of Australian Short Stories: 'White Turtle'

She has also won a swag of awards in the Philippines and elsewhere. (See Wikipedia).

The Kindness of Birds is a collection of linked short stories, connected by common characters and the symbolism of birds. It's also the first book I've read that specifically addresses the pandemic and how kindness has nursed us through the difficult times. This is the blurb:

An oriole sings to a dying father. A bleeding-heart dove saves the day. A crow wakes a woman’s resolve. Owls help a boy endure isolation. Cockatoos attend the laying of the dead. Always there are birds in these linked stories that pay homage to kindness and the kinship among women and the planet. From Australia to the Philippines, across cultures and species, kindness inspires resilience amidst loss and grief. Being together ignites resistance against violence. We pull through in the company of others.

The Covid experience in Australia has been very different to the rest of the world. But Bobis reminds us that even as we live a life that looks much like normal, our friends may have family far away where things are very different. Nenita's family is in the Philippines, where they are in 'military lockdown. Top guy says, "Shoot them dead", those who violate it.' 'So different to here,' sighs her husband Arvis...

'Of course!' she snaps. 'Those who violate the lockdown there are often the most impoverished, desperate to leave their homes to find food for their families.' (p.141)

(Remember the media furore because a wealthy middle-class young woman on L-plates was fined a token amount for breaching Melbourne's lockdown because she wanted to practise her driving?)

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2021/06/22/the-kindness-of-birds-by-merlinda-bobis/… (más)

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.… (más)

An exquisite novel set in the Philippines, by a Filipina author, and one of the best books I have read all year.

Estrella is the fish-hair woman, the one with twelve-meter hair who trawls for bodies in the river when pro-government forces and guerillas sweep through the village. She is the one who remembers and suffers. Her story and those around her are central to this unique book, but the stories that are woven here are about much more. About life and death, of course. And politics and war in the Philippines. About parents and children and siblings. About the past and whether or not we can ever escape it. About history and memory. About a fascinating group of characters. And about finding joy in the face of pain.

Merlinda Bobis is a poet as well as a novelist. She works magic with words, playing with them, repeating them and exploring their meanings. Her novel is multilayered and nonchronological. Events from over a thirty-year period are related. Multiple narrators tell stories that often conflict. Mystery abounds leaving readers and characters unsure of what “really” happened.

Read more on my blog, Me, you and books: http://wp.me/p24OK2-RF… (más)

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.… (más)