nwasianweekly.com
Dec. 17, 2005

A quick look at books

Entrys, by Peter Bacho. Published by University of Hawaii Press, 2005.

Boxing, violence and sex figure prominently in Bacho’s new novel, which traces the mental and spiritual degradation of a young veteran returning home after a particularly harrowing tour in Vietnam. Bacho, a Filipino American who lives in Tacoma, has once again created a unique antihero in the novel’s protagonist, Rico Divina, a 19-year-old Indipino (part-Filipino, part-Yakima).

Volatile, ironic and prone to sudden bursts of physical violence, Rico’s sole ambition in the beginning of the novel is to get laid. In the opening scene, Rico sits in class, fantasizing about Ms. Andrews, his new English teacher: “She sighs and as she does, Rico memorizes her form, toe to head to just above her waist as he follows the movement of her breasts — inhale (breasts up), exhale (breasts down). Thirty-four B, he guesses.” The prologue ends with the following revelation: “He hopes to f**k her; he is feeling patriotic.”

Bacho possesses an uncanny knack for portraying troubled, reluctant protagonists. These are the people we love to hate, who manage to entrance us with a beguiling power. Underneath Rico’s defiant façade lies a passion for writing, and much of the novel’s poignancy derives from observing Rico write about the circumstances of his life with a piercing objectivity. Even as the war has fractured his hope for becoming a balanced individual, it has also triggered a tendency toward intense self-scrutiny. Rico begins asking the right questions: Why are we in Vietnam? What was the sociopolitical state of affairs that led to my being sent there? How do I live now that I have seen what I have seen?

As the book progresses, the author splices Rico’s first-person diary perspective into the story, revealing an intimate glimpse into Rico’s deepening awareness regarding the truths of his existence. As Bacho alternates between first and third person, the personal and the factual, we get a sense of the utter hopelessness of Rico’s situation.

In this wasteland, nothing escapes. All are subject to its merciless presence. As the decay takes root, Rico has an epiphany: “We’re all born with expiration dates, and the only major question is what we decide to do until the buzzer sounds.” This is what gives the novel its note of existential resignation, the unsettling realization that some people are born cursed, damned by family, history and the greater forces dictating the currents of life. Not the most comforting of truths, but a truth nonetheless, borne of a tumultuous American era that should never be forgotten.

Bacho’s novels are not for everyone. Some of his scenes are mildly pornographic, depicting sexual encounters with a gusto reminiscent of hardcore rap. If his intent is to jolt the reader out of a healthy complacency, he does so with a clean, remarkably edgy prose style, verging at times on the poetic. Bacho writes not only for the downtrodden and dispossessed, but also for those who relentlessly seek the facts, who must attain knowledge at all costs, even at the risk of shattering one’s psyche to get it. 

Ultimately, Entrys is a cautionary tale that reminds us that no matter how impersonal the facts, history can never be forgotten, especially by those who must bear the weight of its burden. —Paul Kim 

Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami. Published by Knopf, 2005.

Murakami’s latest novel boasts two of recent literature’s most unforgettable characters: a teenage runaway who carries a tough, teeth-bared critic inside his consciousness and an old man, left feeble in mind by an odd childhood condition, who lives a simple life and finds, in the offhand way in which he takes everything, that he can talk to cats much better than he can talk to humans.

To create these two seems enough at first, as the novel ambles stately through what ends up at 448 pages. But being a runaway, the boy, Kafka, has to run somewhere. And talking with cats, interesting enough in itself, soon leads the old man, Nakata, into gruesome trouble. Johnnie Walker’s involved. That’s right, the little man in red from the liquor bottle. And anyone with a soft spot for cats, and an easily engaged gorge, is advised to avoid the entire Johnnie episode.

Murakami, translated here by Philip Gabriel, writes so engrossingly you can almost forget him leaving his bizarre machinations unresolved. Too many of these lingering questions pile up not very adroitly in the crash-landing of the book’s final 50 pages, but you’ll be too busy goggling at the boy, and the old man, and Johnnie Walker, and Beethoven, and jiving, and the impatient street philosophy of Col. Sanders, to mind much. Murakami writes like a sculptor who whittles the “Last Supper” from a ripe crimson watermelon. Asking why spoils your smile. —Andrew Hamlin

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