Book review: Filipino love stories in screenwriter Ricky Lee’s For B are funny and full of feeling

For B (Or How Love Devastates Four Out Of Every Five Of Us)

By Ricky Lee, translated by Noelle Q. De Jesus
Fiction/Bughaw/230 pages/$12 from Ateneo de Manila University Press website (str.sg/iS5F)
4 stars

This is a novel about love. It is an achievement, then, that the book never turns mawkish or preachy, but trains a humorous, unsentimental eye on the permutations of love among residents of the Philippines.

The premise is aphoristically summed up in a quip by one of its cynical characters: “Love has a quota. For every five people who fall in love, only one will be happy.”

For B (Or How Love Devastates Four Out Of Every Five Of Us) might be a novel, but it is composed of six shorter stories that take readers into the world of five women and their pathologies about love.

The problem with Sandra, for example, is that she is a very fair person who weighs all sides before coming to conclusions. Thus, when she finds herself a boyfriend: “It was a love by the book. No surprising tingles of the flesh. No mysterious quivers in the heart. It was balanced, proper and appropriate.”

Other women readers meet are not happy in love because of other reasons: Irene, who is too faithful to memory, waits on her childhood sweetheart; Erica, who comes from a fictional place in Luzon where love is outlawed, only knows how to repeat cliched lines from movies and television.

They are all unlucky allegories of the titular four in five who are devastated by love, each representing a sin of love that sabotages their chances at happiness.

All kinds of love appear in the slim book – from more vanilla, heterosexual ones to themes of gay and lesbian love.

Political events often tear lovers apart – there are references to popular demonstrations, regime changes, extrajudicial executions. But these roil in the background rather than take centre stage, leaving readers to speculate about the relationship between politics and love.

In this regard, this work recalls novels by acclaimed Shanghai-born writer Eileen Chang such as Love In A Fallen City (1943) – although Ricky Lee’s use of farce, irony and parody sets him apart.

Also known as Ricardo Arreola Lee, he is an acclaimed screenwriter who has written scripts for films such as Himala (1982), which is often considered one of the best films from the Philippines.

For B – Lee’s first novel from 2008 – reads like an anthology film of character studies with thoroughly delicious images and writing that sometimes borrow from screenplay conventions.

So how do these short stories amount to a novel? Gradually, the reader sees characters from previous stories crop up in new ones and they all culminate in a metafictional final story that amounts to a kind of Ricky Lee Cinematic Universe.

That gesture is fun, if a little overwrought at moments and drunk on its own metatextuality. Of metatextual romances embroiled in politics, this reviewer is reminded of the playfulness of Chinese-language Singaporean writer Yeng Pway Ngon’s Unrest (originally published in 2002 and translated by Jeremy Tiang in 2012).

Translator Noelle Q. De Jesus – who is based in Singapore – brings Lee’s Tagalog and Taglish to life in her English translation, which is a breeze to read in its bantering voice and self-conscious humour.

Small wonder that Tagalog readers are already excited for the book’s sequel, which has been announced.

For B is the kind of novel that keeps one reading and rooting for that one in five who will fall in love, be happy and defy the odds.

If you like this, read: No Wonder, Women by Carissa Foo (Penguin SEA, 2023, $24.50, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3sniTE2). A short story collection by a Singaporean writer about women in love, the book’s protagonists are as varied as Ricky Lee’s and are as interested in the deceptively simple question: What is love?