This is a land both fact and fiction, where generations leave no trace of themselves and everything is constantly wiped out by clockwork destruction: typhoon, tsunami, earthquake, drought. Because of this we have no memory of ourselves: we remember only the last deluge, the last seismic upheaval. Two friends are hired by Marcos to rewrite Philippine history. Their mission: to make it appear that Marcos was destined to rule the country in perpetuity. Working from an office called Agency for the Scientific Investigation of the Absurd, they embark on a journey that will take them across a surreal panorama of Philippine politics and history, and in the process question all their morals and beliefs. This landscape includes mythological sultans, mercenaries, the Beatles, messianic Amerasian rock stars, faith healers, spies, torturers, sycophants, social climbers, sugar barons, millenarian vigilantes, generals and communists—the dizzying farrago of lovers and sinners who populate the country's incredible story. By the end of their project—and this breathtaking novel—the reader emerges from a world that is at once familiar and unbelievable. It's what real life might look like if both heaven and hell were crammed into it, and all its creatures were let loose.
Author
Eric T. Gamalinda is a poet, a fictionist and an essayist. He took undergraduate courses at the UST for three years and the UP for a semester. He was a local fellow for poetry of the UP ICW in 1983. In 1990, he went to Great Britain to represent the Philippines in the Cambridge International Writers’ Conference and to attend the Hawthornden International Writers’ Retreat in Scotland, 1991. he got a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy. He participated in the Japan International Cooperation Agency’s Programme for the 21st century. He currently works with the Center for Investigative Journalism. Gamalinda’s poems are collected in Fire Poem/Rain Poem (1976) and Lyrics From a Dead Language (1991). His stories have been gathered in Peripheral Vision (1992). His first novel, Planet Waves (1989), was set during the turbulent Martial Law era. A second novel, Confessions of a Volcano (1990), was written after a visit to Japan, and explores the differences between Filipino and Japanese consciousness. A third novel, The Empire of Memory (1992), is set against the momentous events before, during, and after the EDSA revolt. Two of Gamalinda’s poetry collections won prizes in the Palanca. Ara Vos Prec won in 1985, while Patria y Muerte won in 1988. He also won Palanca awards for: Anatomy of a Passionate Derangement, a one-act play in 1980, "Mourning and Weeping in this Valley of Tears," a short story in 1988, and "The Unbearable Lightness of EDSA," an essay in 1990. His novel, Planet Waves received the National Book Award for fiction from the Manila Critics Circle in 1989. (Source here.)
