What I didn’t realize then is that by refusing to speak Tagalog I was enacting my first attempts at translation, making sense of the dislocation I felt as an immigrant daughter translating my parents’ words into a language that symbolized belonging to me, even though I rarely felt like I belonged.
While caves in the upper Lozoya Valley, about an hour's drive north of Madrid, had been known about since the 19th Century, the Des-Cubierta site was only found in 2009 during investigation of other cavities on the hillside. As researchers slowly uncovered the layers inside, a startling picture of the cave began to emerge. The skulls, they argued, pointed to something beyond the simple detritus of hunting and gathering. Instead, they saw the skulls as symbolic – perhaps even a shrine containing trophies of the chase.
If correct, it would raise a tantalising prospect – Neanderthals were capable of the kind of complex symbolic concepts and behaviours that characterise our own species.
Sparrow is a wonderful novel, but it’s also a visceral and brutal one. The coming of Christianity has brought shame and censure to the lives of the wolves, even though, as Jacob says, “the entire empire is a mosaic of rape and murder and bastardy and forced labour”. Like the very best of novelists engaging with the classical past – Natalie Haynes, Madeline Miller, Mary Renault – Hynes has found a way of making the events of almost 2,000 years ago feel as if they are happening right now, in front of our faces. That’s maybe because, in the sordid, sensual and secretive world he’s writing about, less has changed than we might think.
After the Spanish were overthrown in 1898, Filipinos, who were preparing for independence, found that their nation had been sold to the United States for $20 million. Hard on the heels of this new colonial occupation, a transport ship carrying 600 teachers arrived, to disseminate English as a “civilizing” medium. A 1935 constitution established English, alongside Spanish, as an official language. During World War II, the Philippines was occupied by the Japanese, leaving yet another linguistic deposit.
Amid such a polyglot swirl, what tongue should a Filipino literature speak? The answer given by Gina Apostol in her sprawling, ambitious new novel, “La Tercera,” is — all of them. The book’s substance is a story about a New York writer who is forced to come to terms with her difficult family history, but its most profound preoccupations are linguistic.
Beautiful feelings produce bad literature. If we were to take this idea from Dazai’s unnamed narrator as truth and not glib maxim, then perhaps Dazai has proven its inverse: the ugliest feelings in the depths of ourselves can be mined to produce literature that persists beyond the flesh.
The Hands of Time will appeal to anyone interested in the complexities of making things, and how societies pursue, manage, and implement innovation and how science — in this instance timekeeping — can bolster democracy.