From "Can you Phil Lit?" - A mini-review by Ramil Digal Gulle

After the Body Displaces Water by Daryll Delgado (University of Santo Tomas Publishing House) is a short story collection that can be considered as feminist writing—but without the heavy-handed, blunt-object-to-the-head politics. The main character in most of Delgado’s stories is a woman. These women find themselves in rather interesting situations. You will feel newly-washed after reading this book—with a hint of brine on your skin. In “Conversation,” the two main characters are lovers, a man and a woman, who remain nameless throughout the story. They’re both quite drunk. The man, in fact, is carrying empty bottles of soda and brandy in a plastic bag. Then the woman essentially flips out. Clearly she has issues. Is it because she wants to have kids and, for some reason, they don’t? Another story I liked (perhaps my favorite in the collection) is “In remission”, about a woman who decides to get away from everyone and everything—her well-paying career, her friends, her family—after she’s diagnosed with terminal cancer. However, a one-night stand with a waiter has consequences that make her re-think her previous resolve to die alone. Delgado’s “Summer with scouts, pirates and pregnant rats” is a joyride through the main character’s nostalgia for her lost youth. There’s a scene where she has rather desultory sex with her boyfriend—she’s distracted because she’s worried about a big, disgusting rat loose in the house. Delgado’s prose comes through as clearly as a bell in a Zen monastery, and she knows how to create scenes and details that pack emotional truth. I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, especially those parts in her stories where the sense of time gets fuzzy and (seemingly) breaks down, turning the narratives into stranger stuff approaching the vagaries—and the sensuous intimacies—of memory. (http://www.interaksyon.com/lifestyle/can-you-phil-lit)

A reader's response (Lawrence L. Ypil)

"When I read the stories in this book, I feel like I am reading poems. Their movement reminds me of free verse poems, the line, measured, then forsaken, plot as a kind of movement from, movement to, lingering in bed in the morning, because there is still time. There is always time in the post-modern, post-colonial free-lance condition of the Philippine short story in English. Turn on the TV!"

From the Afterword

Gathered in this collection are eleven pieces – or are there thirteen? – that are admirable in the execution of craft and in the weight of substance. Daryll Delgado’s versatility is evidenced by the range of fictional subgenres that she writes: from the tall tale, to the well-made story, to metafiction – with elements and stylistic techniques derived from fabulation, marvelous realism, surrealism, and the psychological gothic. For each story, however, she does not confine herself to the conventions of one subgenre; instead, she makes two or more of these subgenres fold into each other to create improbably neat works of fiction.... But Delgado’s sleight-of-hand act is no mere gimmickry. Her stories are firmly grounded in the Philippine literary tradition, with concerns still echoing both the school of ‘art for art’s sake’ and that of ‘social consciousness’. As such, she is a leading voice among her generation of writers who, while stretching the boundaries of the fictional genre, continue to pay their respects to those who cleared the way for them. (Rosario Cruz-Lucero, College of Arts and Letter, UP Diliman)

A reader's response (Rod P. Fajardo)

Read: http://rodpfajardo.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/030-after-the-body-displaces-water/

After the body displace water

"In After the body displace water, characters search for warmth in various ways and places -- with alcohol, through love, in memory. A young woman imagines dead, bloated rats under her bed while struggling to understand the traps and temptations of city life. A grandmother brews tea and dreams of Willy Revillame as her husband sings love songs in another part of town. Here, Daryll Delgado employs her fine talent creating a highly sensual world where taste, touch, sight, smell are no mere experiences of flesh but powerful evocations of loss and longing." ( Katrina Tuvera ) "These stories take you under the skin of experience where lurk the raw impulses of lust, anger, fear, boredom, greed, grief. We are ferried unsuspecting into these netherworlds by unreliable actors and narrators. In these subterranean terrains of feeling, and psychic encounters ruled by hints and innuendos, we meet no strangers, we recognize likenesses of ourselves, we find ourselves stripped and unmasked, or discover all the mad disguises we invent to escape truth or responsibility, and thus make reality bearable." (Merlie Alunan)