The Age of Umbrage review: Popular Filipino author/columnist & podcaster Jessica Zafra’s first novel
The Age of Umbrage by Jessica Zafra is available at Shopee, Lazada, Mt Cloud, and the Ateneo University Press. For e-books and foreign orders, please go to facebook.com/ateneo press.
by Noelle Q. De Jesus in the Asian Books Blog, 15 October 2020
That Jessica Zafra is a great writer goes without saying; but her wit and acerbity, her idea (only somewhat facetious) of world domination via yaya and domestic helper make the notion of a novel from her irresistible. Only consider the volumes of Twisted columns she’s sold over two decades, apart from three short story collections, and it’s understandable that The Age of Umbrage (Bughaw, an imprint of Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2020) could not have come soon enough.
A slim book with easy-on-the-eye-catching cover art by Bianca Alexandra Ortigas in bright Crayola red violet, its slightness in my hands is disconcerting. Flipping through, I note the book’s entire six chapters ending at a petite 126 pages. That’s thirty pages fewer than one of my all-time-favorite novels: Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach (which a few critics have called a novella). And then there is her very first sentence, a wistful, heartrending line with hardly a pause for a breath through a substantial paragraph that recalls Nick Joaquin.
From the outset, we sense a master in command of language, smooth as milk, and so all-knowingly authoritative, we relax, confident we won’t be jolted out of the reverie by awkward diction, an inorganic sentence or an overwrought adverb. We turn ourselves over, the way we might turn over in a dream. It’s hard not to hear Zafra’s voice in our head. The buy-in is immediate.
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