Robert S. Rudder

"All the pages of this book, except for the last chapter, were written during the Japanese occupation. They were miraculously preserved because they were hidden inside glass jars that I buried in the garden of my house." - Jes s BalmoriWritten in secrecy during the terrible final years of World War II (1942 - 1945), Birds of Fire, A Filipino War Novel is an intense testimony to the courage of the human spirit facing the cruelty of military occupation. Jesus Balmori (1886-1948), poet, novelist and journalist, was one of the most prominent figures in 20th century Hispanic-Filipino literature. Birds of Fire, his last and most important novel, narrates the rise and fall of the Robles family, prominent members of the Spanish-Filipino high society. Through the survival drama and dissolution of the family, Balmori chronicles the horrors of war, the heroic resistance of a people, and the tragedy of a society facing extinction. After years of hardship, and despite having lost all his possessions in the bombing and destruction of Manila, Balmori was able to complete the manuscript and cede it to the Philippine government for publication before his death. However, the work was never published, falling into oblivion and believed to be lost for more than 50 years. The recent rediscovery and publication of Birds of Fire represents a historic event for the memory of the Filipino people and their literary tradition. This is the first English translation.

Father Nazario Zajar n leads a life of uncompromised humility, loving others and living among the poorest citizens. Life changes for the pious protagonist when his forgiveness extends to sinners that pull Nazar n over to the other side of the law in the eyes of society. Scorned, mocked, and spurned by others, his faith is tested and his bond with the Catholic Church is broken when he rejects political dogma. A tightly written story about living in the trenches of society's shortcomings, the book is an insightful challenge of religion under late 19th-century Spanish rule worthy of inclusion in moral discussions still today.

Galdós's early writings were inspired by the French writer Émile Zola, a practitioner of the literary school of Naturalism. This interest then turned to a type of spiritual naturalism under the influence of Russian writers, including Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, whom he called his "great teacher." One of his most important works during this period was the novel, Nazarín, a kind of retelling of the life of Christ, in which the main character, a disgraced priest, wanders about the countryside with two female companions, attempting to follow the teachings of the Bible to the letter. He is taken for either a saint or a mad man, and at the end is shut up in an institution. The publication of Nazarín was followed by its sequel, Halma, only six months later. In this novel, the protagonist, an aristocratic lady named Halma, after suffering great hardships, decides to use her inheritance to found an idyllic Christian society, harboring the needy and the sick. Two of its citizens will be the priest, Nazarín, and one of his two women followers; another will be Halma's ne'er-do-well male cousin, Urrea. Her family and their friends express admiration for her high ideals, but they also believe she may be just as mad as the priest, and work to defeat her. A fortunate denouement comes only after the unforeseen intervention of the supposedly "mad" priest. Halma also has many points of contact with the motion picture Viridiana, by Spain's' great director, Luis Buñuel. In this film, a religious novice, Viridiana, attempts to turn a farm into a shelter for needy beggars. During her absence, however, the beggars wreck the house in a drunken orgy. While not sharing Buñuel's artistic vision, Galdós, nevertheless, expresses his own ideas with great imagination.

In this modern age, when the means of communication have turned individual and collective history into a spectacle, literature is the privileged space of subjectivity. This book allows us to peer into the fascinating inner world of characters trapped in their particular deliriums: a club of fetishists who discuss their sexual manias, a man in love with a whale-woman, a man whose wife has left him for another woman, and a beautiful secretary who is also a mother feeling asphyxiated by her family. Readers, no matter how they see themselves and what their sexual preferences may be, will experience the same sensation.