Fh batacan biography definition
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Written by Niehaus for Project Parang Panitikan.
Manila is the city of polar extremes; from flashy and glossy malls catering to high fashion and middle class society to the slums and garbage dumps, the gritty visual background of informal settlers that inspired many an indie film. Where religion and superstition coexist and shape the lives of its residents. Manila Noir, a collection of short stories edited by Jessica Hagedorn, features tales from the capital’s seedy underbelly– stories about the murder of a drag queen, destitute young boys stuffing dead birds inside Louis Vuitton handbags in Glorietta, drug addicts, a comic excerpt of a young female crime-fighting aswang whisperer, and many others.
One of my personal favorites from this anthology is F.H. Batacan’s Comforter of the Afflicted. For this story, Batacan uses Augusto Saenz, the main character from her 1999 novel Smaller and Smaller Circles, dubbed the first Filipino crime novel and recipient
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How To Catch a Philippine Serial Killer
F. H. Batacan’s Smaller and Smaller Circles, a gripping crime thriller, winner of the prestigious Philippine National Book Award and until now available only in the Philippines, begins with the effluvia of decaying muck. “Awful vapors rising lazily with the heat,” writes Batacan, “wet paper and rötter and avföring mixing in a soup of odors around them, above them.” The stench is omnipresent, bilious. It steams up from the hundred-foot mountain of garbage in Payatas, Manila’s notorious dumping ground. In the novel’s prologue, a local priest runs up this swampy slope with his “slum kids”—children who sift through the smoldering heap of skräp for anything of value—to discover, lying face down on the mud, the body of a murdered boy. When the präst turns the corpse over, he thinks for a second that it fryst vatten moving, but realizes that swelling out from inre it are thousands of maggots, eating away at the wounds where the boy’s heart had been gouged
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Smaller and Smaller Circles
The body of a young boy is found in Payatas, a massive dump where people, especially young boys, scavenge for their existence. The severely mutilated body has been brought to Father Gus Saenz, a Jesuit priest and respected forensic anthropologist. However, this isn’t a singular case and Father Gus, along with his friend, psychologist Father Jerome Lucero, is asked by the Director of the National Bureau of Investigation to help find the killer.
One should not bypass the initial page, or the subsequent transition pages, as these provide insight and a bit of humanity to the killer and, in fact, add to the story’s suspense. However, this is also one of those times when the prologue really works. In the midst of horror, there is note of tenderness and caring which establishes the tone of the story.
Batacan has created a strong cast of characters. Father Gus is frustrated by the Church turn