16th
After a week of prose in fits and starts, I finished this caustic novel. I don’t know if I would recommend it to anyone looking for something to read.
However, if you’ve ever felt that a person’s experiences honestly portrayed cannot be duplicated by two books, nor your emotions stirred in exactly the same way twice - that each read shakes you in different ways, searches out different people in you and drags them into the light, and that these very qualities are what make a book a book, then yes, this what you’d call a book.
A mess of characters who hang around the same seedy rooming-house night after night, while the Japanese occupation grows terrifying and debilitating in their collective experiences, violence off somewhere in the distance, real or imagined or self-inflicted.
The ending left me unsatisfied until I remembered I never read books for their endings anyway. Thank you Mr. Nolledo for something horrifying and gorgeous and new.