The Three-Cornered Sun

"The 1896 Philippine Revolution is a story Filipinos know all too well, in one dimension, from boring textbook history. Linda Ty-Casper spins a tale from 1896 from a family living through the birthing pains of the nation. I regret judging Ty-Casper’s The Three-Cornered Sun from its cover when it was first published in 1979. Given a new lease on life, the novel speaks to a new generation that will hopefully ensure that the present (and the future) will stop reading like the past."

"In my opinion, Linda Ty-Casper ranks among the greatest of Filipino novelists. She has been writing novels and short stories since the 1960s to the present time. Linda Ty-Casper’s greatness lies beyond her numerous awards and impressive number of books; it lies in her mastery in storytelling and her choice of subject matter."

“Linda Ty-Casper is a major figure in Philippine Literature. The literary work (fiction, poetry, play, or the essay called “creative nonfiction”) is work of language and work of imagination; it creates/makes real a human experience. The sense for language is the basic creative sense. The literary work is wrought from rather than written in a given language. The writer forges her own path through a given language’s lexical wilderness and makes her own clearing there. The ground of language which she shapes is a people’s culture through their history. Herself shaped by language, she is already spoken for, but may, in her own time, speak back and clarify, even modify, a given outlook. Any language then (Tagalog, English), given an adequate mastery of it, can shape one’s sense of country (like nation, an abstraction).Thus, our literature, from whatever language, is our people’s memory. A country is only as strong as her people’s memory, Imagination’s heartland. One’s country is what one’s Imagination owes its allegiance to."