"To Read and Evaluate", a Report by Francisco Arcellana

GREAT PHILIPPINE JUNGLE ENERGY CAFÉ is, as they say, a good read. It still is. I read it forward, I read it backward, I read it here and there and everywhere, I’m still reading it. Again, as they say, it gets better with each rereading; i.e. it is a good reread! I’m still rereading it. I’m not just reducing “the radius of intimacy,” I’m trying to relate to it. That’s the one necessary thing that the reader of Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café has to do—relate to it. I’m not saying that the reader should relate to it completely—this is not possible. How can a reader relate to something that its writer is, as a matter of fact, trying to relate to? And thereby, as they say, hangs the tale. But there’s no impediment to one perceiving the form, seeing the superb structure, touching with one’s fingertips the texture, total, terrifying. As they say, this novel is a poem, this is a novel that only a poet could have written, that a poet, indeed, has written. For the novel is written, and still writing itself; the novel is composed, like music—it closes with a downbeat but not close, not with a tonic, not with a dominant. The only way to read this novel is to listen to it. For it is musical. Moreover, it is magical, in all senses of the word—it is full of magic, the work of a magus, a modern magus.

To say the least thing: it’s a work of real genius, of great originality—it begins where it ends, its ending is its beginning; it ravels and unravels and, at novel’s end, is still unraveling! Everything that has ever happened to the Philippines, everything that has ever happened to the Filipino, happens in it. As a matter of fact, everything that is happening to the Philippines and the Filipino is in it and there still happening. A café alright—Kapihan: great as great, Filipino as Pinoy, a jungle to the jugular, sure pure sweet shit energy! burning dimly, burning bright.

If Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café is not the great Filipino novel that we’ve been waiting for, it is surely the great comic Filipino novel. In any case, its material is the stuff out of which the great Filipino novel will be written. This novel is comic in a sad disconsolate way, it has a kind of grandeur, a grandeur all its own; it is, in its own inimitable way, charged with grandeur, the grandeur of music, the grandeur of magic, the grandeur of poetry—the grandeur of God? death and transfiguration and resurrection! the grandeur of the living God?

oh such a nice party! Thanks Alejandrino for authorizing me to read and evaluate Great Philippine Jungle Energy Café. Thanks Adrian for making the writing of this great, comic Filipino novel possible. Please please please pretty please make its publication possible!

(I can see it now with illustrations by Ruiz Tence.)

Thanks Krip for this magnificent novel. You are right: not time but man is the supreme fiction. Gracias.

Francisco Arcellana
Wednesday 13 November 1985
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, Virgin

(The preceding is the report written by Mr. Arcellana as official reader assigned by Adrian E. Cristobal and Alejandrino Hufana of the Grants Committee of the Philippine Writers Foundation and the Cultural Center of the Philippines.)

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