Kilometer Zero

by Glenn Diaz

Alvin Estrada, a call center agent for telecom giant UTelCo, feels he is invoking Philippine colonial history whenever he spars with ex-boyfriend Scott, an American scholar based in Manila. On a trip to Pagudpud, Scott's bag is stolen, and in the search Alvin discovers something in common between his relationship with Scott and the nightly torture that he calls his job.

96 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2016

About the author

Glenn Diaz is the author of the novels The Quiet Ones (2017) and Yñiga (2022), recipients of the Philippine National Book Award, and When the World Ended I Was Thinking about the Forest (2022), published by Paper Trail Projects. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Rosa Mercedes, Liminal, The Johannesburg Review of Books, and others. Born and raised in Manila, he holds a PhD from the University of Adelaide and currently teaches with the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

Reviews

[Ivan Labayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

back to manila after almost losing wallets and not finding, yet solidifying selves in pagudpud, alvin and scott are back in cubao. they saw, "limp in a piece of wood...a boy of maybe nine or ten years, a tangle of flesh and bones in an oversized shirt." Scott said something "about a classic Russian film, a scene that unfolded on a famous flight of stairs, the only time he saw something quite like it in real life" Was the Russian film Battleship Potemkin? Someone said, "Girls, sir?" and it was cubao bathing them as they cite something academic, something very cultured naman, like an eisenstein film.

Legs will be "like jelly" in a bus, talks will be about "pek-yaw" and Morales, the Galleon Trade, Alvin's life as a call center agent. Was there imperialism somewhere in the book? How complex is it outside the discussions of our walls? What happens when two men hold hands and not look in love; when one grew up in the 'states' and the other in the capital of the former's colony? will the "big bad colonial state" always end up winning, "coopting intimate gestures"? can we not have anything else aside from "imagined insurrection"?

the book asks us to listen: "the staccato of a horse's hooves clatter[ing] loudly then faded... the far-away blare of a fire truck, a balut vendor's hoarse invitation," the colors of the heart beating like a dying pig, the scent of a finger reading a surface not a hard book, the possibility of politics in long, seemingly innocent notes about Manila

[eve · Rating 3 out of 5]

wow!!!!!!!!!

[Patricia · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terrible.