The Descartes Highlands

"Behind Eric Gamalinda's jagged, ice-pick prose is an urgent need to connect and to understand. Are we more than the sum of our histories? What is this accident of being? Why is there anything at all? Written at the edge of a sinkhole and determined to resist its pull, "The Descartes Highlands" is a [...]
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"Behind Eric Gamalinda's jagged, ice-pick prose is an urgent need to connect and to understand. Are we more than the sum of our histories? What is this accident of being? Why is there anything at all? Written at the edge of a sinkhole and determined to resist its pull, "The Descartes Highlands" is about nothing less than the whole bewildering dream that is human consciousness."
--David Hollander, author of "L.I.E."
"No one writes like Eric Gamalinda, though we wish we all could. "The Descartes Highlands," an amazing work of brutal candor girded by a philosopher's calm, entwines our present despair with the horrific pasts we will not escape. One of the most dazzling novelists writing in America today, Eric Gamalinda has an almost classical Greek faith in the redemptive power of art. This novel delivers a commitment to beauty as unflinching as the bleak truths it tells--about globalization, about colonialism, about our human madness--offering in turn what seems our only, paradoxical hope: the pained telling of our story--a gorgeous and bitter feast."
--Gina Apostol, author of "Gun Dealers' Daughter"
"Gamalinda's characters are both struck by the curse and graced by the blessing of their cosmopolitan condition. The story wraps together distant places, seemingly different from one another but all contaminated by the same evil: human solitude and our inability to engage in love and genuine relationships. Gamalinda would not say it out loud, but it seems there is hope for this world after all."
--Diego Marani, author of "New Finnish Grammar" and "The Last of the Vostyachs"
"Like Walt Whitman, Gamalinda contains multitudes--but with a better sense of humor."
--Barry Schwabsky, art critic of "The Nation"
"Eric Gamalinda's attention and spirit are vibrant."
--Michael Burkard, Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award winner
Two men, each unaware of the other, share a common family secret: they were sold for adoption by their American father shortly after their births in the Philippines. Three alternating stories interweave the experiences of father Andrew Breszky and the two sons who try to connect and piece together the puzzle of their reckless, impulsive father. One lives in New York and the other grows up in the south of France, later traveling all over Asia as a documentary filmmaker. Both will discover that their relationships somehow echo that of the young man whose history eludes them.
Celebrated Filipino writer Eric Gamalinda's international debut novel is a contemporary work of ideas that combines mystery, film noir, and existential philosophy. Highly intricate and written in a style reminiscent of the maverick narrative techniques of such filmmakers as Andrei Tarkovsky and Bela Tarr, and with some of the philosophical underpinnings of Michel Houellebecq or Javier Marias. Named after the region of the moon where "Apollo 16" landed in the same year these men were born, "The Descartes Highlands" demonstrates that for lives marked by unrelieved loneliness, the only hope lies in the redemptive power of love.