Molded by Linda Ty-Casper’s expert hands, history is not a rigid, dead thing; it moves, it thrums, it powers the machine that illuminates the circumstances we find ourselves in today. In his novel, Empire of Memory, Eric Gamalinda bemoans the historical amnesia that seems to have infested Filipino consciousness: “...we have no memory of ourselves: we remember only the last deluge, the last seismic upheaval.” With the republication of Ty-Casper’s novel The Three-Cornered Sun, readers now have another opportunity to discover how skillfully she recreates the passions and perils, the tempers and tragedies of revolutionaries attempting to birth the Filipino nation. 

Voices from the Dark

Set in 1896, The Three-Cornered Sun follows the fortunes of the Viardo family as they navigate the hopeful and tortuous beginnings of the Philippine revolution against Spain. Ty-Casper imbibes her characters with a specificity and complexity that makes them much more than mere caricatures of revolution and counterrevolution. There is Simeon, eldest son of the Viardo clan, an intellectual just returned from Spain. Unlike Ibarra in the opening of Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere, Simeon is not the wide-eyed repatriate eager to enrich the lives of his fellow with knowledge from abroad. Simeon is disillusioned, bitter, cold. He suffers several, soul-crushing winters in Spain in a futile attempt to advocate for reforms in his home country. He watches his comrades die pauper’s deaths in roach-infested boarding houses because the movement which sent them abroad did not send them sufficient resources to stay alive. And in his homecoming, he finds his country a tinderbox of insurgency. He clashes with and grows to love his nephew, Cristobal. The novel’s twenty-eight chapters portray the perspectives of a panoply of characters, but it is Cristobal who provides the heart of this novel, however flawed that heart may be. He struggles with maintaining honor and principle under increasingly dishonorable conditions. He shoulders the guilt of leading men to their deaths. Of the entire Viardo clan, he gives himself most completely to the struggle, carrying its ideals from battlefield to family reunion. 

And the entire Viardo clan does not stand with Cristobal. His father and Simeon’s brother, Blas, is a hedonist and unrepentant gambler. His cousin, Leon, is a solider in the Spanish army, an irony not lost to either of them. On the ship back to the Philippines, Leon reads an inscription on the back of a photograph from his uncle Jacob which says, “To Leon who must someday choose his ancestry.” He dreams of him and Cristobal riding the same horse, which splits into two as they follow diverging paths. The Three-Cornered Sun shows those caught in the crossfires of revolution: mothers praying novenas for their captured children, defiant daughters who see nationalist fervor as a front for male braggadocio, landlords, smugglers, prisoners-of-war, ordinary farmers fighting for a simple end to endless suffering. Ty-Casper’s novelistic skill is expansive enough to encapsulate all these confrontational and contradictory voices, which she uses to craft a truly rich and nuanced novel on human triumph and suffering. 

Novels of Wartime

One cannot help but compare The Three-Cornered Sun with Exploding Galaxies’s first imprint, Wilfrido Nolledo’s But For The Lovers. Nolledo and Ty-Casper are equally adroit storytellers. But whereas But For The Lovers is decadent, heady, meandering, The Three-Cornered Sun is clean and disciplined in its language. Reading But For the Lovers made me feel like I was entering a different state of consciousness. Reading The Three-Cornered Sun reminded me of the importance in paying conscious attention to the craft and detail of great prose. Early in the novel, there is a harrowing scene of a lioness eating her cub after the chaos of an assassination attempt. Describing the startling presence of Vitoria, Cristobal’s aunt, Ty-Casper writes, “Vitoria burst into her courtyard, eyes trailing the bright reflection of her gown on the blue and green tiles.” Landscapes are “a continuous mound of gray light that lay incoherent upon the sand.” Ty-Casper does not spare us from description of the violence of war or the atrocities of wartime. Cristobal asks himself, “Was there a just way to kill as there was to live?” A prisoner describes the dank and sadistic environs of his jail: “Water from the river was seeping into the stone floor of the underground cell...He wished he could slide down into it, be covered by the mud that leached between the limestone. Now the guard was running the torch between his legs.” Ty-Casper recognizes her grandmother, Gabriela Paez Viardo de Velasquez, for telling her the stories that would form the novel. However, it’s also Ty-Casper’s careful and visceral language that allows her to transport the reader into the trenches of the Philippine revolution. 

Ultimately, The Three-Cornered Sun is remarkable for the wealth of its ideas. Characters have gripping, impassioned debates about the values of revolution versus reform, the relationship the Philippines should have with Mother Spain. These exchanges are marvelously erudite and deeply personal. Simeon reminds his brother of the penury he faced in Barcelona. Leon’s sister, Ursula, confronts Cristobal in the gloom of her family chapel. “Are you now Bernardo Carpio come down from the mountain to save Filipinas? Whom will you free?” she asks him. Ty-Casper’s novel reminds us that freedom is not a finished act. It is a process that stretches from the horrors of colonization to the everyday monstrosities of contemporary life. It involves confronting the facets of history that have been swept aside, erased, forgotten. And Ty-Casper brings this history to beautiful life.