Confessions of a Volcano by Eric Gamalinda

On the one hand, it has created an audience for ethnic American literature, including Asian American literature on the other hand, it has stimulated U.S. has opened a window for Asian –American writers. The attention given to ethnic American studies and minority discourse in universities in the U.S. I see this as a significant trend - namely, the increasing importance of the Diaspora - in Philippine literature. And, though some of the novels end on an ambiguous note, with the protagonist still trapped in indecision, most-including the one comic novel in the group, The Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café-finish on a note of affirmation. They employ such postmodern techniques as the collage, a variety of language Registers, discontinuity of narration, et cetera, to depict the fragmentations and carnivalsque quality of modern Philippine life (as in Gina Apostol’s Bibliolepsy and Alfred Yuson’s Voyeurs and Savages). They explore Philippine mythical material, an important part of the work of retrieval, of reconstruction, of the retelling of the story (as in Erwin Castillo’s Firewalkers and Cecilia Manguera Brainard’s Song of Yvounne). Dalisay’s Killing time in a Warm Place, Renato Madrid’s Devil Wings, Carlos Cortes’s Longitude, and the novel of Ediberto Tiempo, F.Sionil Jose, and Antonio Enriquez), to those associated with marvelous realism and postmodernism (as in Eric Gamalinda’s Confessions of a Volcano and Empire of Memory and Alfred Yuson’s Great Philippine Jungle Energy Cafe).

In their attempt to (re )write the story, contemporary Filipino novelists have appropriated a number of different strategies, ranging from those of conventional realistic fiction(as in Jose Y. Here then, over and over again, is the middle-class intellectual, unable to escape his or her roots, determined to save his or her country, thwarted both by the sinister power of the enemy (in some cases still the colonial master of old, in others his surrogate) and by the tragic flaw in his or her own character, which often is indecision.

The protagonists of many of these novels are in many ways reincarnations of Rizal’s Crisostomo Ibarra, perhaps an indication of both the enduring power of Rizal on the imagination of Filipino middle-class writers and the inescapable aftermath of the historical situation that gave rise to his novels. Contemporary novelists have all gone beyond the recording of their protagonists’ personal conflicts to focus on the larger problems plaguing the nation. But, while it may not have been the dominant trend in the Filipino novel in English in the past, of late it clearly has been so. This tradition of writing has always existed in the Filipino novel in all languages.

Confessions of a Volcano by Eric Gamalinda