The solemn lantern maker
By: Merlinda Bobis
Publisher: Pier 9
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Sydney
Language: eng
Number of pages: 207
ISBN-13: 9781741960785
Description: "It is the cosmic reduced to the simplest terms. Ten-year-old Noland, a mute lantern maker, imagines an angel falling from the sky to the slums where he lives. But it's only an American tourist who is caught in a drive-by shooting of a political journalist. At a busy intersection in Manila, the magical and the seedy collide: shimmering lanterns and poverty, Christmas carols and child prostitution, dreams of friendship and the global 'war on terror'. A hut in the slums becomes a cathedral and silence is an exchange breaths. This raw and hard-hitting tale of our times is delicately spare in its prose, with room for silences. Reading it is like walking into the lantern maker's hut where 'life must be squeezed to pocketsize, breath must be kept spare ... Be frugal where life is fragile'."--Provided by publisher.