Practice Task 1.

Read Me
Read the Book Review sample of Caroline Hau’s ‘Tiempo Muerto’. Study how
the reviewer, Ruel S. De Vera, developed his review of the novel “Tiempo
Muerto.” and answer the questions that follow on your answer sheets.

Caroline Hau’s ‘Tiempo Muerto’ is a powerful first novel that explores distance and
identity
By: Ruel S. De Vera Philippine Daily Inquirer / 04:01 AM January 20, 2020

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On the scarred surface, Lia Agalon and Racel Panindagat can’t have anything in
common save for their location. At the beginning of Caroline Hau’s “Tiempo Muerto:
A Novel” (Bughaw-Ateneo de Manila University Press, Quezon City, 2019, 275
pages), the two are still both in Singapore. Lia is the daughter of a wealthy Filipino
family married to a wealthy Singaporean executive and Racel is an overseas
Filipino worker working as a nanny for the Wong family.
But it turns out the two are connected in powerful ways—Hau constructs the
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connections one artery at a time. Lia’s story is told in third person; Racel is the
daughter of Lia’s own nanny, Yaya Alma and tells her story in first person. The two
alternate chapters and share a past on the fictional location of Banwa Island.
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“Tiempo Muerto” kicked into motion when the two return to the Philippines, sent
into motion by telephone calls. Racel must hurry home because her mother has
gone missing. Lia escapes Singapore after a divorce due to a tabloid-exposed affair
with her personal trainer. They return to Manila first, and, of course, eventually back
to Banwa.
But not yet. Racel and Lia must go on journeys of their own, forward and back,
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before what is obviously going to be a fateful meeting.

In the meantime, there is a lot of story to be told. As Racel says: “Most of what I
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know my mother told me; the rest I make up.”

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As Racel returns to Banwa in search for her mother, she increasingly becomes
aware of just how little she knew about Nanay, especially after Racel had left for
Singapore:
“It does not surprise me that Nanay has been martyred and canonized over and
over. I do not know this stranger. To me, she is just Nanay.”
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Despite sharing the narrative with Lia, Racel is clearly the dominant character and
narrator. It is through her that the reader more heavily navigates the mined
sugarcane field of memories and questions within “Tiempo Muerto,” some of them
resonant to this day.
Dead season
The novel takes its name from the tiempo muerto, the “dead season” between
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planting and harvest, when sugarcane workers go hungry because they have no
paid work: “Our stomachs understood the difference between pain and hunger. We
knew what it was like year after year, to walk the purgatory between life and death.”
Hau is a respected writer of literary history and criticism; she has also written two
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excellent collections of short fiction, 2015’s “Recuerdos de Patay and Other Stories”
and 2019’s “Demigods and Monsters.”
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The issues and techniques she deployed in those collections are in full force, in
conjunction, in her debut novel. Banwa Island is very much a character by itself.
There is a lot touched on in between Racel and Lia’s stories: the heart-wrenching
OFW experience, the death of marriages, the possible haunting of a balay daku,
indoctrination, oppression, a long-delayed slow-burn romance, family tensions and
the turbulence of the Marcos years: “The dead season of 1985 was different, for the
demons had come unshackled and roved the countryside,” Racel recalls. “Turning
Banwa into an inpierno for the living.”

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 It explores the nature of distance and identity between people. Yet it works
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because Hau doesn’t miss a thing. There is an unusually clinical quality to Hau’s
prose, but instead of putting you off, you just wind up admiring theseobviously
carefully constructed complicated doll houses of plot. There are entire pages of just
details piled on top of each other, but they’re never over-written, and perfectly
balanced. Incidentally, Hau had included the Agalons in a previous short story. Can
we call the connective space between all her stories the Hau-verse?
By the time Lia and Racel inevitably meet toward the end of “Tiempo Muerto,”
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readers will know they have experienced something extraordinary, the coming
together of two characters who had been so far away from each other yet never
really apart over all these years and miles. Those connections were more powerful
than you imagined or dreaded. This is a powerful debut novel from Caroline Hau.
There is just so much story in “Tiempo Muerto” that one is reminded of Nanay
Alma’s admission to her confused daughter: “You can leave whenever you want to,
but as the years grow heavy, you feel as if you no longer have any choice.”
Source: https://lifestyle.inquirer.net/355673/caroline-haus-tiempo-muerto-is-a-powerful-first-novel-thatexplores-
distance-and-identity/#ixzz6RrKlssYt

1. Do you think the setting Banwa Island is in existence in real life? Why?

2. What does the writer mean when he said “walk the purgatory between life and
death’?
3. Based on the review, what do you think is the theme of the novel by Hau?

ANSWER:

1. No, as stated in the review Banwa island is a fictional location.

2. It refers to the hardships that the sugarcane workers experience every year.
3. Based on the review I can say that the theme of the story is about, “ The hardship that a person
experience and the strong bond between mother and child. “

Practice Task 2. Elements in Review

Refer to the Book Review in Practice Task 1. Fill in the table below by writing the paragraph numbers
where an element of review or critique can be found. Also, identify the elements observed. Do this on a
different sheet of paper.

Paragraph or line number Element

Summary
Paragraph 1-7
Paragraph 8 Reviewer’s statement

Paragraph 9 Brief biographical sketch

Paragraph 10, 11 Objective evaluation

Paragraph 12 Quotations

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