The Winds of April by N.V.M. Gonzalez (Out of Print)

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"Winds of April starts with the narrator recounting his early years in Mindoro and Romblon. Acquainted with two languages and cultures, Tagalog and Visayan, it is the water that separates these two places that is closest to his heart. His numerous travels, however, bridges the distance. Just like Gonzalez’s other works, a substantial part of the story revolves around the countryside. The rustic landscape and the local color that Gonzalez uses mirrors the Filipinos and the growing rejection of American predominance at the height of the Commonwealth era, a time when the Philippines was still seeking its independence from the United States. Born in Romblon and raised in Mindoro, it is no wonder why towns and the typical rural folks in these provinces appear throughout Gonzalez’s works such as A Season of Grace, Look, Stranger on this Island Now, Work on the Mountains, and Mindoro and Beyond. As he struggles in the sea of life, trying to find a better way of survival, the narrator also encounters love interests. Romance saturates the text. In every encounter, the subject almost always utters the passage “I want to kiss you,”. An overly high degree of emotional outburst can be noticed, an idiosyncratic characteristic of prewar literary works. Other prewar novels such as Zoilo M. Galang’s A Child of Sorrow and Juan C. Laya’s His Native Soil, also have strong love elements. As poetess and critic Ophelia Dimalanta said in her book Philippine Contemporary Literature in English: Tradition and Change, “this love motif ran through almost all Filipino novels prior to the war.”" -Excerpts from the author's website.

About the Author
NVM Gonzalez was born in the island of Romblon, Philippines in 1915. Besides three novels and five collections of short stories to date (as of this writing, when The Bamboo Dancers was written (1957), -- The Winds of April, 1941; Children of the Ash-Covered Loam and Other Stories, 1954, A Season of Grace, 1956; The Bamboo Dancers, 1957; Look Stranger on this Island Now, 1963; Selected Stories, 1964 and Mindoro and Beyond, 1979 - he has published an autobiography, Kalutang: A Filipino in the World and a collection of essays, The Father and the Maid. In 1947, he joined the English Department of the University of the Philippines where he taught for eighteen years. He was Visiting Associate Professor of English in 1968-69 at University of Hong Kong. For nearly eighteen years, he was based at California State University, Hayward and held visiting professorships at University of Washington, Seattle and University of California, Los Angeles. NVM Gonzalez had received several awards for his writing, which includes the 1954 Republic Award of Merit for Literature in English, the 1960 Republic Cultural Heritage Award, the 1961 Jose Rizal Pro-Patria Award, the 1989 Gawad Pambansang Akagad bi Balagtas (Balagtas National Award) and the 1990 Gawad Para sa Sining for Literature (Award for the Arts).

In 1997, N.V.M. Gonzales was named Philippines' National Artist for Literature. When he passed away in 1998, The NVM & Narita Gonzalez Writers' Workshop (NVMNGWW), a non-profit organization was established to honor the life and works of two remarkable persons who devoted their lives and professional careers to writing and education. Nestor Vicente Madali or simply NVM (1915-1998), a Philippine National Artist in Literature and for whom the writers' workshop is named, was first published when he was sixteen and continued writing and publishing until 1998. Only death kept him from his work and self-proclaimed mission of articulating the Filipino world through literature. Narita (1920-2016), his wife started as a writer as well, and spent most of her professional life as an educator. She has authored several children stories and essay anthologies. Her devotion to NVM, to his career and her four children, made for a partnership in work and life that influenced many students, colleagues, and personal friends. In honoring NVM and Narita, the Workshop hopes to continue their good work in supporting and encouraging fiction and nonfiction writing as an expression of life and culture, beyond its communicative functions, but also as a link to each other, as Filipinos scatter throughout the globe in diaspora, so that their sources of inspiration and the purpose of culture are remembered and honored and inscribed in literature.
A Philippine import.

Paperback : 206 pages
ISBN-10 : 971542140-7
ISBN-13 : 978-97-1-542140-9
Publisher : University of the Philippines Press (January 1, 1998)
Item Weight : 1.11 pounds
Language: : English