![]() ![]() ![]() If “The Miracle Worker” and “The Virgin of Monte Ramon” are about devastation on a small scale and the tragedies of everyday life, “In the Country” works on a macro level, exposing the widespread horrors that powerful world leaders can commit. In the title story, a novella-length work, a dictatorial regime in the Philippines (based on Ferdinand Marcos’s government) commits murder and deems it a suicide, throws political dissidents into jail, and kidnaps a rebellious journalist’s young son. Nevertheless, Danny and Annelise are forever scarred by their physical impediments.Īnd it gets worse as the collection progresses. In the end, there’s something of a silver lining-hardship, it appears, can also lead to powerful friendships and lasting bonds. It’s painful to read about children’s capacity for nastiness and the limited support that Danny and Annelise receive from the adults in their lives. Eventually, he befriends Annelise, a classmate ostracized for her impoverished background and uncommonly painful menstrual periods that keep her out of school for days at a time. He suffers the taunts of unsympathetic schoolchildren. The protagonist, Danny, copes with a birth defect that has left him without functional legs. “The Virgin of Monte Ramon” works in a set-up similar to that of “The Miracle Worker.” Illness and the betrayal of the human body feature strongly in the story. Finally, and most insidious, is the character who has harmed Aroush in the past. Sally is dishonest with the mother about the possibilities for the girl’s improvement. ![]() Her mother’s life is forever burdened by her daughter’s needs. Nature plays a nasty trick on the disfigured girl. The levels of cruelty in this story are manifold. At best, she’ll eventually learn how “to hold objects, to communicate without words, to recognize sounds, even shapes.” Through working with Aroush, Sally discovers that her student has suffered some past trauma at the hands of another human, though it takes a while for Sally (and the reader) to piece together exactly what happened. The cruelty of chance, genetics, and her body has condemned the girl to a life in which she’ll never be able to speak. Along the left side of her neck grew a pebbly mass of tumors.” Sally fails to tell the mother the truth about her daughter’s predicament-that there’s little hope. Faint brown smudges the size of thumbprints dotted her face. Sally describes how Aroush’s “head swelled out dramatically at the forehead and crown, like a lightbulb. In “The Miracle Worker,” Sally Riva has a “medical kind of appetite for staring at disorders, at things gone gruesomely wrong in the body.” She takes care of a child named Aroush in whose physical disfigurement Alvar spares no detail. As a result, Alvar demonstrates the havoc that humans-from resentful housemaids to corrupt politicians-can wreak. These are rich, meaty, fulfilling stories in which everyone’s hiding something-from extramarital affairs to murder.Īt the heart of these secrets, and of many of these stories, is cruelty in its multitudinous forms. As she writes in one of the stories from her debut collection, In the Country, “the quietest, most docile worker could, behind her apron or her uniform, be sharpening her blade.” While Alvar writes in subtle, descriptive language about Filipino characters, their jobs, and the places they live, she’s setting the reader up for jarring plot twists and shattering surprises that leave us questioning everything she’s previously written about her characters. ![]() Don’t be fooled by Mia Alvar’s smooth, languid, slow-paced prose, for behind it hides sharp observations of human nature and our capacity for cruelty. ![]()
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