Merlinda BobisReseñas

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.

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, 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/

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.

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

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.

Set in the Philippines during a period of civil unrest, this book is part war story, murder mystery, political thriller, romance, and historical epic. For my full review, please see Whispering Gums: http://whisperinggums.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/merlinda-bobis-fish-hair-woman-re...

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.½

I started this but couldn't really get into it. I stopped after about 30 pages.

This is one of the strangest books I've read recently. It is well-crafted in a literary sense, but the descriptions of child abuse are disturbing. The book centers around food. Food is also used metaphorically to describe the events of everyday life on this single street in the Philippines where both rich and poor reside.

This coming-of-age novel is set in the Philippines in, as best I can tell, the early 1960s. Years later, the narrator recalls the summer of her 12th year, the summer she “ate the heart of the matter.” All of the action takes place on the narrator's street, bound on one end by a church and on the other end by a volcano. The residents of the street range from affluent to extremely poor. 12-year-old Nenita's family of eight are some of the poorest on the street, and food is always scarce for them. Nenita is driven by her hunger and is obsessed by thoughts of food. She views all of the events of the summer through the lens of food, translating her emotions into flavors such as bitter, sour, sweet, salty, or hot.

Although I read it fairly quickly, it isn't a particularly easy read. The author has an unusual writing style and uses a lot of imagery relating to food, such as the banana heart of the title. Sometimes it is difficult to tell if the narrator is describing a real event or simply using her imagination. This book would be an interesting selection for a reading group. It deals with universal themes such as belonging, acceptance, unrequited love, and parent-child relationships.½