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By Jose Angelo D. Cantera, Contributor
Have you ever tried to Google the word
“beauty?”
I did that, once. And, as expected, most of the
sites that came up had a lot to do with things like fashion,
celebrities, tourist spots and traditional art.
Of course, there’s nothing really wrong with
that. But if beauty is generally defined as a quality that
pleasurably exalts the mind and the spirit, then we will be
underestimating the full capacity of the word if we encompass its
definition under those things alone because, whether you believe it
or not, everything has the power to be beautiful.
Tragedies can be inspiring when it brings people
together. Poverty can be moving when it pushes them past their known
limits. And scars—of all things— can be glamorous too if the
person who has them can wear them with pride. All you really need is
a sense of hope to understand that while things aren’t so good,
they can still get better. And like most of us Filipinos, David
Lehane understands this notion quite well.
In his latest anthology Coronado:
Stories, this award-winning writer of thrillers such as Mystic River
and Gone Baby Gone, ironically tells of hope with his classy yet
untamed perception of the violent side of the human mind. With five
short stories and a play, the book delved into the lives of several
people thrust into extraordinarily terrible circumstances.
A good example of this is the fifth tale, Until
Gwen. This story is about an ex-convict who was fetched from jail by
his criminal of a father and was immediately tasked to search for
the gem that got him into prison in the first place. In the process,
he was then forced to examine the seemingly irredeemable life in
which his father raised him in leading to a heartrending course of
events.
Apart from the edginess of the stories, the book
also features a roster of likeable yet mostly degenerate characters.
Throughout its no more than 240 pages, these people populate a world
that shows you how humanly common they are before exposing you to
disturbingly aggressive sides that testify to everyone’s innate
ability to cause pain.
Ironically, the book is not traditionally
uplifting. The pieces usually have the characters going through
tremendous and oftentimes questionable lengths to better their lives
only to end up with nothing but dreams, dead bodies, a lot of
cussing and a lot of broken things. But while this tragic atmosphere
lingers, with the weight of the world on their shoulders, along with
Lehane’s tendency to kick them repeatedly while they’re down,
what stands out in the end is the reality that a lot of them still
endures, exemplifying the often overlooked power of the human heart
to keep going.
And like the acts of coming together at the face
of tragedy, rising from poverty or wearing scars with pride, this
book finds beauty with what a lot of us possess; the comically
tragic, oftentimes stubborn and surprisingly rewarding ability to
hope.
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