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literary_hazelnut's review
challenging
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
From the publisher: “Joy is a story of joy—lived forward, backward, sideways, and upside down, in lives and loves that are fragmented, separated, gathered, made virtual, and made real.”
JOY is that one nuanced contemporary novel that doesn’t necessarily dwell on national identity but rather on the middle class Filipino experience, and one that I’ve been longing to read. From being sent to a science high school and to a good university and then establishing a career in one’s chosen field, every young Filipino (myself included) with the same socioeconomic status as Lucas, our protagonist, would surely relate to.
And speaking of relatability, Angelo Lacuesta’s prose *flows* and connects Filipinos across generations. There are several pop culture references in the 1970s that were lost on me as a gen Z Filo, but I recognized some of them from my mom’s childhood stories, including the Tagalog-dubbed Japanese anime series Voltes V and Kabuto Kaizer (Mazinger Z) that, like our protagonist, my mama also grew up watching, and which the now-dead dictator Ferdinand Marcos ordered off the air in the 1970s for its themes of resistance and rebellion. 😭😭😭
Jumping back and forth in time, a huge chunk of the book takes place during the Martial Law years (from the early 1970s to the late 1980s). But unlike the other dissident novels I’ve read, this one revels in its resistance against existence. Themes of identity persist throughout this web of stories, and amid the events taking place, we see how the individual resists. We read about society matrons and their philandering husbands, and we also read about politicians’ wives sleeping with their servants. We read about youngsters and old folks, fathers and sons. We read about robots in TV, and we read about mascots in commercials. We read about the little lives under the shadows of an oppressive regime, albeit not entirely the book’s focus.
And though titled JOY, this novel also brings to the fore other emotions—love, fear, anger, shame, guilt, disgust. The novel is unabashed in its depiction of the human condition, as it also comes with it some absurd scenes that evoke feelings of lust and loneliness.
And it is through Lucas’ eyes, our protagonist looking back at his life, that we see how the individual moves along with life (no matter the forces acting on it): onward and forward.
Also highly appreciate the other nuances in this novel, like the 70s/80s Tagalog slang “anong type mo” to ask “what would you like,” which would sound weird when used in conversations today. Such nuance brings me joy. One paragraph also caught my attention as it aptly describes life during the Martial Law Years. The imagery of “pounding porcelain saucers into the skin and flesh of the roasted pig” is the most literary way of describing how the rich (mostly Marcos’ capitalist cronies) lived a lavish lifestyle (porcelain saucers as metaphor for it!!!) at the expense of the common Filipino (the skin and flesh of the roasted pig—roasted pig or lechon is often served during special occasions but many Filipino families had to tighten their belts and make do with whatever’s available because the country’s economy was down in the dumps back then, and still is lol)
Thank you to PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE SOUTHEAST ASIA for sending me a review copy of this newly released book by Filipino author Angelo Lacuesta. Save for the typos I’ve spotted here and there, reading this in its entirety was pure JOY. 🥰💖
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