Riverrun is a celebration of the people of the Phillippines, their ability to endure with a smile twenty typoons a year, dangerous volcanoes,corrupt governments and for better or worse the all powerful Catholic Church. The rhetorical methodology of Riverrun is very creative. I have spent a bit of time there and really enjoyed the account of the narrator’s time in London. After his time in the military school ends he gets a grant to study in London. Slowly he begins to discover feelings for other young men. He enters a private military School where “new boys” are subject to initiation rituals in which they are expected to preform homosexual actions on each other to gain acceptance. As you can imagine this was very much a shock and a sensory overload. We are there when he moves to Metro Manila, a tropical mega-City of over twenty million. We hear stories from Filipino mythology told by his grandmother and his yaya. The depiction of the narrator’s early years was just marvelous. There are several regional recipes scattered through the narrative, something most readers will enjoy even if they probably cannot get all the needed ingrediants. The narrator’s family is relatively affluent, above the abject poverty of millions struggling just to feed their families. (Even now it takes a prescription to buy a condom.)īiggest island Luzon, near the Mayon Volcano.

It is structured as a memoir about growing up in a very Conservative mostly Catholic country in a period when same sex relationships were very much frowned upon while slowly coming to the realization you are gay. ( My wife lived through the era also and she and her siblings were trained not to ever mention anything about Marcos.) Children were taught to never talk about the government. Remoto wonderfully shows how this climate of fear impacted upbringing. He would, however, use deadly force on anyone brave enough to speak out against him. Not driven by ideology or ethnic hatred but by a desire to enrich himself and his wife Imelda. Riverrun is set in the era of the Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines (1965 to 1986).

I love this book.m I give my great thanks to Elaine Chiew, I have featured her work numerous times, for turning me on to this novel. # globalpridelitmonth: an interview with Danton Remoto Elaine Chiew’s very interesting interview with Danton Remoto

Riverrun danton remoto