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Do you remember Chona? Feb 11, 2009
By David Norris
I fell in love with Chona the moment she fell into Frank's arms. More happens to him in the first 48 hours in the Philippines than happens to most people in a lifetime. Wonderful book that captures the truth of a time that has passed.There was nowhere on the planet earth like Olongapo in the 80s.
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Kudos for Salvos Dec 21, 2008
By F. J. Logan
Reading Peter Bollingon's Salvos we experience life in the twilight years of Ferdinand Marcos' Philippines, in the sprawling barrios of Olongapo, in the antiseptic geometry of Subic Base, and on board a giant U.S. aircraft carrier. These depictions ring true, and they would make the book worth reading, as history / anthropology / political science / sociology.
But Salvos is more than the sum of its particular true-to-life merits. Salvos is art, pure and simple, and it can stand on its own. Mr. Bollington is a real craftsman. His sentences bear reading and re-reading. His style is spare, less-is-more. He writes with just-right nouns and sparkling verbs. If it took Flaubert all day to come up with the perfect descriptor for a wheat field, how long did it take Mr. Bollington to invent the perfect descriptor for, e.g., palm-fronds-in-the-wind? Who knows? But he did it.
Mr. Bollington is a master stylist and a first-rate story-teller. He weaves fact and fiction into a seamless web of credibility and interest. Through the character Frank Salvos we live the lives of the infamous Tregrew, the sinister Rowaldo, the bungling Valerio (and his sure-footed gecko), the starchy Harrison, the villainous Lagarto, the beautiful Chona, and dozens of others.
These characters are well-conceived, original, and sharply-drawn. They speak from the heart and to the point. We care about them. We feel their failures and tragedies, we delight in their comic turns. The Olongapo bar scenes, for example: laugh-out-loud, alcohol-fuelled absurdities. The book as a whole: buffoonery, mayhem, suicide, corruption, insanity, and murder--one after another. Plot-twists and double-twists, and Mr. Bollington brings them all together.
The scenes seem natural, even inevitable. True, we might wonder, e.g., Why the beer-bottle-balancing crazy woman? But, in this world, a much better question is, Why NOT a beer-bottle-balancing crazy woman? She plays her part, makes her own kind of sense. "You come back," she says, to her long-departed lover and to Salvos and to us, and we relish the ambiguity. Yes, we think, we have come back, and we'll return. That's because Mr. Bollington has breathed life into these men and women, articulated their deepest needs, and made them memorable. He has given to airy long-ago a local habitation and a name: Olongapo.
Frank's girl shouts, "Remember Chona!"
He does. So will we.
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