Novel
The Woman Who Had Two Navels
Nick Joaquin · 1961
Synopsis
Connie Escobar, a young wife from Manila, claims to have two navels and goes to Hong Kong to ask Pepe Monson, a Filipino veterinarian who treats horses, to rid her of one. Also living there are his father, old Dr Monson, a revolutionary who preferred exile to swearing allegiance to the Americans, and Paco Texeira, a jazz bandleader; around this woman who is fleeing her husband and her mother, the exiles reopen the accounts of their own past and that of their country.
Context
The novel develops a long short story published in the early fifties; its author wrote it during the two years that a Rockefeller grant allowed him to spend, from 1955, in Spain, the United States and Mexico, and it was published in book form in Manila in 1961. In it he takes up the question that runs through his work, that of a country that had been Spanish for three centuries and then American for half a century, and of what it was to keep from each.
Who it is for
A medium-length novel, in English, in a baroque style. His short stories are more accessible.
Prizes and reception
First winner of the Harry Stonehill Award for the novel; it is its author's first novel, regarded as a classic of Philippine literature in English.