Balik-Tanaw: The Road Taken: Memoir of a Literary and Cultural Critic Through Filipino Eyes

Balik-Tanaw: The Road Taken is the memoir of the distinguished Filipino critic, Soledad S. Reyes. This book is a record of Reyess journey of more than seven decades where personal narrative intertwines with people and events, with social and political movements with which the country sought to negotiate the treacherous shoals in the postwar years. The account carries a fair amount of biographical data (as lodged in the critics memory in the absence of diaries), from her childhood into her college years. But as the context becomes wider and more complex, the narrative takes on a more analytical frame as she tries to make sense of disparate experiences whirling about her in the tumult of the 1970s and beyond, and in the startling changes in the political landscape, local and global, that now grip the Filipino nation. This account, according to the author, is a story of an individual constructing a narrative that seeks to impose order upon chaos by retrieving aspects of the past and weaving a series of recalcitrant experiences into a coherent whole. Published in association with De La Salle University Publishing House

Soledad S. Reyes is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of the Ateneo de Manila University. She is the author/editor of over forty books of literary criticism on the Tagalog novel, Philippine popular culture, Philippine women’s writings, as well as of translation. She was awarded the A.L. Becker Prize for Translation (2016) for What Now Ricky, her translation of a Rosario de Guzman Lingats novel. Her English versions of other Tagalog classics include: Antonio Sempios The Golden Dagger; Lingats The Cloak of God and The Death of Summer; and Precioso Palmas Avenge Me.