Book Review of Siege Malvar’s Oral Hystery
I don’t even know if I can make a perfect review to describe the reading experience of shit in a shitty world, and how virality and a playbook of disinformation shapes the collective psyche, or gusto na lang ba natin na mag-shutdown ang META because that US stock is just leeching off from our never ending attention span of a goldfish. Hindi ko mai-articulate nang maayos, pero sadyang kapag lumubog ka sa kaka-selpon mo, lulubog din ang brain cells mo.
Although self, pat in the back ka: good job in selling this novella! This is indeed Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke in Filipino. Yun nga lang, sa ibang butas lumalabas ang dumi. Taena, tae nga. Also, instead of a newspaper-interview-circa-1979-style of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s (aka TJR) Daisy Jones and the Six, Siege crafted the pages like a facebook news feed, circa 2009 (kasi walang profile picture; parang lahat sila, kakagawa lang ng fb profile way back then). It was easier to navigate, compared it to a script-like format of TJR. Instead of being bored to a long thread of lines, it felt like watching a very long KMJS segment of virality and monetization, and shaping the pop culture and polpolpolitics.
Small note on pages 47 and 48, the inflections of taenfluencer: the editor could have removed the parentheses of (Proudly) and (Derogatory), respectively. Marami kasi makaka-gets upon second read. Or maybe it stayed because more GenZ readers recently post the punchlines in socmed with these ~moods~ as ~aesthetic~.
Let me digress with a meme:
~Mahal kita at ang sakit-sakit na!
~sinaksak ang sarili
~Aray (umiyak)
I’ve also felt Siege’s sheer hate with advertisements and targeted marketing and his frustrations of not earning dollars from his previous novel named Charged, a selponserye which is a stark contrast with Vince and Kath. Vince and Kath was a wildfire, transcended into a wattpad/pop fiction and soundtrack and movie rights, while his work created a sleeper hit, million engagements, and yet, it only birthed as a 3-part-novel (two of which are now “shelf items”, considering the speed of change in the social media space.) Charged is now an artifact of the pre-pandemic and pre-AI era.
And I get the frustration. Kahit akong gustong magpasa ng manuscript sa Avenida, hindi ko pa matapos kasi kulang sa panahon. Wala rin akong stamina kasi nakakapagod maging accountant. At least ikaw Siege, nakakapag-katha man ng isang magulo at maruming kaek-ekan, pero nananawagan pa rin sa mga tao na wag maging Bobalyn at huwag lalong maging Pvblicity Media.
Naalala ko yung recent game walk through na napanood ko sa youtube: We are what we Behold. A game version of this book, sans the tae, but explain how our eyesight lures into a trendsetter, and slowly letting us go into a chaotic world we build ourselves.
Hopefully, through reading this book (and through reading as a lifestyle), we lift ourselves a bit away from the chaos we have made.
mariaellabetos.com 