Pia’s Reviews > Voyager and Other Fictions: The Collected Stories of Jose Dalisay > Status Update

Goats 4 Sale. A scene from Manila's underbelly. Draws a line between the value of goat meat and sex services, as if to say "It's valued very lowly".
I'm kinda miffed by it. There's an evident dislike of the city's rough sides, with the only time it explicitly makes it blatant is the indictment of the jeepney's way of loading and unloading passengers. Great prose but yeah, topic-wise its uncomfortable

Deuce of Hearts. Butch Dalisay's two favorite things to describe in his stories: poker, and women

Cypraea Leucodon. I liked the smallness and largeness depicted in the text

Some Families, Very Large. That was depressing

Only the Beginning. The pattern is: Young boy lusts over woman A, woman A has interesting character, suddenly reveals she leads a fucked up life and the status quo changes for the worse. Young boy becomes a grown man, remembers the woman but the reader never finds out more about her. He turns out mostly happy and definitely successful, meanwhile she just fades out of our plot. Ick

Napoleon's Revenge. 15,000 is so small

Penmanship. A recurring relationship dynamic thru this collection (and therefore, Dalisay’s body of fiction work) is older man & younger woman. Hm.
About the story itself I can see why Pantoja-Hidalgo likes this one best. The non-couple have enough tragedy respectively that makes the unfolding of the last scene a truly strangled affair. Also are there earlier depictions of situationships than in Dalisay’s?

Ybarra
"I would raise you into ladyship, but you play me down to boyhood, and, God help me, I seek whatever it is you do, I seek you, in the cleverest banter with the newly-returned-from-Paris, in the operating room with choice blood dribbling on my gloves, in my round, upholstered age, I seek you and would bear with anything to feel your liquor- silvered breath on my cold hands"

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