Maryanne Moll’s novel “The Maps of Camarines” (Penguin Books SEA, Singapore, 2023, 214 pages) tells the story of the Arguelles, Visbal, and Monsantillo families who were powerful and wealthy haciendero clans in a fictional province in the Philippines.
Their economic and social standing has remained uncontested by those in their midst. However, generational secrets that speak of deceit, greed, and corruption have begun to fester beneath the veneer of gleam and glitter of their lives. The sins of the forefathers would come to a head. Calamities and death wreaked havoc on the land. The transgressors faced vengeance.
Sadly, the cycle of life would go on. The Maps of Camarines mirrors the forces of our collective past history that continue to assail Philippine society and the consequences they inflict on the generations of today and tomorrow.
Book Review by Vanessa P. Bicomong
First published in the Lifestyle section of the Inquirer, March 3, 2024, titled “Debut novel is a family saga of grandeur and greed.”
Family sagas are among the most fascinating stories: from the House of Atreus to Isabel Allende’s “The House of the Spirits,” we are riveted by the fortunes of families through the ages. Is it because we glimpse what should be kept private—the struggles and secrets, loves and lies? Or because family sagas prove that our forebears are the true source of both blessedness and doom?
The fast link of family and fate is memorably demonstrated in Maryanne Moll’s “The Maps of Camarines.” Her first novel chronicles the intertwined lives of three powerful families—the Arguelleses, the Visballes and the Monsantillos—who dominate the fictional but true-to-life province of Camarines.
The patriarchs were Spanish dons who came to the Philippines armed only with their ability to negotiate, using it to create pacts with friars and promises to land-owning Filipinos that were never kept. The titular maps are the ones drawn and redrawn multiple times over decades, until finally the official map depicted Camarines as the fiefdom of the three clans.
Undercurrents of violence
It is the Arguelleses’ lives—genteel but with undercurrents of violence—that Moll describes painstakingly, with the other families serving as supporting cast. Their lives are fascinating because you know it’s not fiction: hacienda parties were that lavish, the feasts that sumptuous. The grand homes are described in anthropomorphic detail and named accomplices: “providing shelter and seclusion to the evil that unfolded for much of two hundred years.”
Moll, a Palanca Award-winner with several essays and short story collections to her name, wants her novel to help preserve the past. It vibrantly succeeds.
Moll’s descriptive powers truly shine in her faithful description of Filipino Catholic practices such as the Santissimo Rosario and the Semana Santa: older generations will hanker for the good old days while the young will want to experience those Holy Week traditions themselves. There’s also a good dose of magical realism, with several ghosts hinting at an otherworldly horror in the finale. The highlight is Esperanza Arguelles’ debut, a night when the simmering violence finally rises to the surface and the sins of the fathers come to light. Havoc is wreaked not by the dead but by the living.
“’The Maps of Camarines’ is a chronicle of the forces that have and continue to assail Philippine society today, as well as the consequences if they are left to fester in the time to come,” Moll writes, revealing the intentions behind centuries-old traditions as insightfully as the cause of the ongoing fight for land. All through stories of what defines us first and most: family.
Link to book review on lifestyle.inquirer.net.
Book review by Jen Lansangan
First posted on Instagram, onechapteraday.ph, July 2023.
The house was alive and its memory was vivid and immense, and its secrets were carried in the immensity of its foundations and the confused manner of its layout.
– Maryanne Moll, The Maps of Camarines
Set in the 1950s, after WWII has concluded, three Spanish patriarch families, Arguelles, Monsantillos, and Visbales, migrated in a fictional province in the Philippines called Camarines.
Dominated by the pioneer family, the Arguelles, who also owned the largest grabbed lands from Spanish friars and Filipinos, Camarines seemed to be a bountiful agricultural land surrounded by mountains that protects the town from typhoons and with rich and fertile soil irrigated naturally by rivers and lakes.
This is a downfall tale of the families due to the inevitable degradation of power caused by aging secrets sheltered by the glistening glamour of their corrupted haciendero lifestyle.
It was a breath of fresh air for me to finally read on my own culture and tradition in an eloquent and compelling writing of Moll. She was successful in threading a multigenerational story in the confines of 214 pages overshadowing the past and future of each member of the three families.
The enigmatic characters were so interesting that I hoped for the author to have expounded more on their development because I wouldn’t mind if the story was made into a series, instead. It also touched the well-kept struggles of the older women in a highly patriarchal society where they’re just expected to become good mothers—their highest possible form of achievement. On the other hand, it featured also the slow transition as the western culture was introduced together with the English language.
Personally, I was riveted by the fluidity and directness of writing despite the discussion of heavy themes from domestic abuse to violence in the affluent households (where love cannot be expressed explicitly) that made me finish the book in just two days.
Link to book review in onechapteraday.ph on Instagram. (Sign-in required)
The header image was cropped from the old map of the Philippines, commonly known as the Velarde map, first published in 1734 by the Jesuit cartographer Pedro Murillo Velarde.
About the novelist
MARYANNE MOLL has written three books. Her first book, Awakenings (2001), and her second book, Little Freedoms (2003), are both collections of essays. Her third book, Married Women (2014), is a short story collection, and the book was a finalist for the Cirilo F. Bautista Prize for Best Book of Short Fiction in English in 2014. Her short story ‘At Merienda’ won Third Prize in the 2005 Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature.
Her short stories have also been included in anthologies, which includes Philippine Speculative Fiction IV, Philippine Genre Stories: Special Crime Edition, and Anomalous 30. She was a fellow for the National Writer’s Workshops in the University of Santo Tomas (2002), Dumaguete (2002), and the University of the Philippines (2021). Before writing fiction, she was a reporter and columnist for Bikol Daily, and also worked as disk jockey and newscaster for an FM radio station in Naga City, Camarines Sur. She has created and managed some publications for the Philippine National Police. More recently, she has worked as a Publications Specialist for a government-owned-and-controlled corporation for more than ten years.
She has earned units for the degree Master of Arts in Creative Writing at the University of the Philippines Diliman, before transferring to a different degree program. She is currently working on her thesis for Master of Arts in Comparative Literature, Major in Literary Theory, at the UP Diliman. (Reference: Penguin Random House SEA)
Where to purchase
Physical stores – Philippines: Fully Booked, Mt. Cloud Bookshop, and Artbooks.
Physical stores – other countries: Kinokuniya in Singapore, Kinokuniya and MPH in Malaysia, and Kinokuniya in Thailand.
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