BOOK REPORTFILIPINOS ARE NOT BOOK LOVERS

By Arelene Babst-Vokey

Characters: Arlene Babst-Vokey - The Author/First persona Filipino

STORY:

Some years ago, a friend of mine observed that in Japan, the bookshop seemed to be the most popular feature of practically every street block. While in the Philippines, instead of bookshop, it was the beauty parlor vying closely with the sari-sari store.

In commiseration, I made the wistful remark that at the turn of the century in London, Virginia Woolf was already making good money doing just book reviews for newspapers and periodicals, and through her highly rarefied novels and short stories, some of which became bestsellers of her lifetime.

In sad contrast, almost a century after Ms. Woolf was able to support herself with her writing, Filipino writers would starve if he or she depended solely on “literary writing.”

The problem is Filipinos hate solitude. Count the number of Filipinos you know who enjoy being alone, and being in a book. For them, it’s absolutely terrifying.

Reading a book requires time and patience; endurance, if need be. It isn’t over in an hour or two like movies or television shows. And Filipinos with our ningas-cogon tendencies, like our entertainment fast and light, have suitably short attention span.

Furthermore, books deal with ideas, worked out mainly through characters and plots. There is always some horrid symbolism lurking somewhere, and the conflict of one system of thought against another. However for most of us, we prefer our conflicts played out among personalities rather than in ideas–it’s much easier that way and more exciting. Ideas can be so dull.

THE LITTLE PRINCEBy Antoine Marie Roger de Saint-Exupery

Characters:

The narrator The narrator is really the author, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The reader hears his voice throughout the book as he relates the story of the Little Prince and of his own friendship with him. The narrator says plainly that he is a romantic who does not like adults, whom he finds too practical; instead, he prefers children, whom he finds natural and delightful. The narrator writes this story of his encounter with the Little Prince in order to deal with the sorrow of losing his precious friend. 

The Little Prince The novel is named after the Little Prince, who is a mystical and loveable person. He is the sole inhabitant of a small planet, which the narrator refers to as B-612. The Prince leaves his planet to visit other places and finally lands on Earth. In the Sahara Desert, he meets the narrator and befriends him. The narrator tells of his encounter with the Prince and also relates the adventures of the Prince on the other asteroids that the latter has visited. 

The fox The Little Prince meets the fox in the desert. The fox is a wise creature, which teaches the Prince about the essence of life. After they become friends, the fox asks the Little Prince to ‘tame him, which is what the latter does. 

Settings:The book is not set in a particular period or in one specific place. In the first chapter the narrator writes about his childhood experiences with drawings and about his low opinion of adults. In the second chapter the narrator starts narrating a particular series of incidents. He writes of the time when his plane crashed in the desert of Sahara six years ago. Most of the narrative after the second chapter is set in the desert. The other places that function as settings include the asteroid where the Little Prince has his home and the planets that the Little Prince visits, including asteroids 325, 326, 327, 328, 329, and 330. The last planet that he visits is the Earth, where he meets the narrator in the Sahara Desert. The story is really about the narrator’s friendship with the Little Prince and about the Prince’s own quest, which takes him to seven planets apart from his own.

STORY:

A fox appears, and the little prince asks the fox to play with him because he is so unhappy. The fox replies that he cannot play because he is not tamed. After a while, the little prince asks what the meaning of "tamed" is, and the fox explains that to tame is to establish ties, meaning that if they are tamed, then the fox and the boy will need each other and become unique in each other's eyes, despite all the other boys and foxes in the world. The little prince says that he believes there is a flower who has tamed him. The fox discusses his monotonous life of hunting chickens and being hunted by men, and he asks the little prince to tame him so that his life might have more meaning. The fox teaches the little prince how to observe the proper rites and tame him, and the little prince does so. When the little prince is about to leave one day, the fox says that he will cry, but that being tamed has nonetheless done him good because the color of the wheat-grain will now always remind him of the little prince's hair. The fox tells the little prince to go observe the bed of roses again, and this time the little prince tells the roses that they are not at all like his rose at home because no one has tamed them, and so they are empty. The little prince then returns to the fox to say goodbye. As they part, the fox tells him a secret: "It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." The little prince realizes that he is responsible for his rose.

STAR QUALITYBy Debra Ollivier

CHARACTERS:

Narrator The Little Prince

STORY:More than 50 million copies of “The Little Prince” have been sold sinceits publication in 1943, the year before its author’s disappearance; every year an additional 1 million copies arebought. The book has been translated into 102 languages and dialects,including Esperanto, Congolese and Sardinian. Several film versions havebeen produced (a Paramount film with Bob Fosse and Gene Wilder, and aNickelodeon cartoon series, among others), and the likeness of the littleprince can be found on the new French 50-franc bill, on CD-ROMs andvideos, and on bed linen, watches, address books, figurines, dolls,wallpaper, postcards, backpacks, notebooks and keychains.Editors at Gallimard, France’s biggest publisher and home to “The Little

Prince,” are stumped by the book’s unflagging success over the decades. “Wereally can’t explain the phenomenon,” says Philip Lezaud. “It’s one ofthose mysteries. The book has an aura about it. It is almost inexplicable.”Indeed, how does a seemingly simple tale about an infinitely melancholiclittle boy on a tiny asteroid compete in the antic and overcrowded zoo ofchildren’s marketing?Grown-ups are perplexing at best, and downright dangerous atworst. In the celebrated first paragraph of the book, our narrator explainshow, as a young child frustrated by adults consistently misconstruing hisdrawing of a boa constrictor digesting an elephant as a picture of a hat, he gave up “what might have been a magnificent career as a painter” to pursue thesensible professions endorsed by adults. In so doing, he surrendered hisown powers of childlike vision. “Alas,” he says, unable to see through thewalls of boxes like the little prince, the odd yellow-haired child who appears before him one morning in the Sahara desert, “I am a little like the grown-ups. I have had to grow old.”Cast upon our planet only to find that the Earth is nonsensical and as curiously bleak as his own desolate asteroid, it’s no small wonder that the little prince is sad. In fact, he is filled with unrequited longing and nostalgia. His melancholy is so expansive that even the narrator is stricken by an undefinable “sense of grief,” and it is this very sadness thatchallenges the persistent notion that children are, and must be at alltimes, happy.The little prince, in his quest for meaning in a seeminglymeaningless world, offers children something that falls between the artifice of entertainment and the disappointments of the real world, a tiny foothold onthe slippery shoals of reality. In this he bears the stamp of the countryand time that bore him: Saint-Exupéry and Jean-Paul Sartre werecontemporaries, after all, and so was Martin Heidegger, who called “TheLittle Prince” “one of the great existential books of the century.”

THE VELVETEEN RABBITBy Margery Williams

CHARACTER: Velveteen Rabbit Skin Horse Nana Nursery Magic Fairy Boy

STORY:

A stuffed rabbit sewn from velveteen is given as a Christmas present to a small boy. The boy plays with his other new presents and forgets the velveteen rabbit for a time. These presents are modern and mechanical, and snub the old-fashioned velveteen rabbit. The wisest and oldest toy in the nursery, the Skin Horse, who was owned by the boy's uncle, tells the rabbit about toys magically becoming Real due to love from children. The rabbit is awed by this idea; however, his chances of achieving this wish are slight.One night the boy's Nana gives the rabbit to the boy to sleep with, in place of a lost toy. The rabbit becomes the boy's favourite toy, enjoying picnics with him in the spring, and the boy regards the rabbit as 'REAL'. Time passes, and the rabbit becomes shabbier, but happy. He meets some real rabbits in the summer, and they learn that he cannot hop as they do, and say that he is not real.One day, the boy becomes sick with scarlet fever, and the rabbit sits with him as he recovers. The doctor orders that the boy should be taken to the seaside, and that his room should be disinfected, and all his books and toys burnt - including the velveteen rabbit. The rabbit is bundled into a sack and left out in the garden overnight, where he sadly reflects on his life with his boy. The toy rabbit cries and a real tear drops onto the ground, and a marvellous flower appears. A fairy steps out of the flower and comforts the velveteen rabbit, introducing herself as the nursery magic fairy. She says that because he is old and shabby and Real, she will take him away with her and "turn [him] into Real" - to everyone.The fairy takes the rabbit to the forest, where she meets the other rabbits and gives the velveteen rabbit a kiss. The velveteen rabbit changes into a real rabbit, and joins the other rabbits in the forest. The next spring, the

rabbit returns to look at the boy, and the boy sees a resemblance to his old velveteen rabbit.

TONIGHT I CAN WRITEBy Pablo Neruda

CHARACTER:

Boy – who love a girl

STORY:

A boy who love a girl. He loved her but sometimes she loved him too. He feel like he lost her. What does it matter that his love could not keep her and she is not with him. He’s soul is not satisfied that it has lost her. His sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer, His heart looks for her but she is not with him. They are no longer the same. He was no longer love her. He remember her voice, her bright body and her infinite eyes. He doesn’t know if He no longer love her but sometimes he love her. Love is so short; Forgetting is long.

LEARNING WHAT WAS NEVER TAUGHT (AN EXCERPT)

By Sabine Reichel

CHARACTER: Adolf Hitler