The Weight of the Sun

by Geronimo Tagatac

A Vietnam veteran stalks a teenage boy through the summer night. A magical ring infects a community of farm workers with nightmares. A first meeting with a man’s father-in-law at an expensive restaurant turns into a celebration of bloodshed. In the endless cubicles of a state bureaucracy, another man mysteriously ceases to exist. These are a few of the stories that comprise this extraordinary collection in which acclaimed author Geronimo Tagatac explores themes of culture and identity, belonging and alienation. Through the eyes of returning Vietnam veterans, migrant laborers, immigrants, and civil servants, Tagatac delves into the experience of being an outsider with a rare candor and insight. Tagatac draws from his diverse experience to deliver narratives that are at once spare and eloquent, vividly capturing the terror of jungle combat as well as the painful flush of first love. In these short, unflinching, deeply felt tales, rifts are not always healed. Unbridgeable gaps remain between people and between worlds ― sometimes deliberately, sometimes despite everything. Driven by the honesty of self-appraisal and joy for life that is evident in every line, The Weight of the Sun reveals to us that it is as much through our failures in trying to bridge these gaps as through our successes that we come to discover the best parts of ourselves.

Genres: Fiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2006

Reviews

[S. Wigget · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Weight of the Sun by Geronimo Tagatac is a collection of interconnected short stories with a predominantly melancholy tone, brilliantly portraying characters who experience trauma from child abuse, loneliness, abandonment, broken dreams, and the senseless violence of war. The author poignantly expresses the universal truth of human emotions and needs. It is appropriate that some of the stories involve ghosts, such as “What Comes After Nineteen,” in which a woman picks up a hitchhiker after noticing that he’s a ghost; even without ghosts the stories are haunting.

[Maeko · Rating 5 out of 5]

Geronimo Tagatac has a gift when it comes to the written word. He has mastered the ability to convey emotions and make his reader feel like they are part of the story itself. The Weight of the Sun is a collection of short stories that follows the Guerreros, a Filipino-American immigrant family, over various generations, jobs, and wars. Tagatac explores the struggle of immigrant farmers, the emotional side effects of war, as well as the navigation of dealing with ghosts and death. The eloquent and evocative writing investigates what it means to be human as well as the complicated, but loving relationships within families. This is by far my favorite book to come out of Ooligan Press and I only hope that Tagatac will publish new work to dazzle his writers once again.

[Trey Stockard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Weight of the Sun is a collection of short stories about the fictional Guerreros, a family of Filipino and Filipino-American immigrants. The thread that runs throughout is author, soldier, dancer, laborer, short-order cook, ski bum, graduate student, cubicle worker, homeless man, and world traveler Geronimo G. Tagatac, whose own life stories are refracted through the various members of the Guerrero family. Most haunting are those from the narrator’s childhood, about his father and his father’s people. These are earthy and elemental, tinged with mythos, the new lore of a people forever severed from their home. Infused with blood and soil, labor, wandering, strength and mysticism, they read like Filipino folklore transplanted to California’s central valley, where Tagatac grew up helping his father as a farm laborer. Stories like “The Center of the World” reveal a young boy severed from his mother, mistreated by his stepmother, raised in a world of lonely, itinerant men who are the real center of his world and the connection to something old and powerful that will sustain him throughout his life. Later stories reveal a young Vietnam veteran trying to make sense of his past and present after he returns to civilization and university life. Others depict an older man still struggling to find a home, vacillating between the mundanity of office work and the uncertainty of an itinerant lifestyle. Tagatac’s prose is sparse and effective in the tradition of a Hemingway, yet blessed with a gentleness and beatitude that miraculously persists in spite of suffering. The words all read like they are written to be spoken aloud. Heavy in content, light in form, radiant with everyday truth, Tagatac’s stories lay spread before us like their namesake, “a broad promise under the light, sweet weight of the sun”.

[Dusty · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is good stuff, he tells stories from the viewpoints of a group of people who interconnect across age race, and immigrant experience. like the young filopino american guy going off to college, his buddy in vietnam, his "uncles" in the migrant farms. tagatac touches the heart, the real heart of all sides in a story, read this book and be gently changed. i was.

[KR · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wonderful collection of short stories that deal with the themes of race, culture, coping with war, coming of age, and the value of life. This would be a great resource to use in a highschool or college level class.

[Marjorie Thelen · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took a workshop with him and bought this book. He's a great short story writer. I read the first two stories and while he is a tremendous writer, I don't care for the subject matter. So I doubt I will ever finish it.

[Judy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little gem exhausted me! I heard Tagatac read from this work in Eugene. He mesmerized his audience. He writes stories about Filipino immigrants in California, flashbacks from Vietnam, and trying to mesh with a post-war American culture. Incredible.

[SmarterLilac · Rating 4 out of 5]

A richly detailed, sensitive portrait of a family.