Name: The Quiet Ones
ISBN: 9789715508841

Glenn Diaz

During a regular shift at the call center, Alvin Estrada discovers a way to embezzle money from the American telecom giant for which he mans the phones. Soon a couple of friends join in, and the operation proceeds smoothly up until they quit, vowing to take the secret to their graves. A month later, a phone call at 4 in the morning tells Alvin that the police are on their way. At once a workplace novel and a meditation on history and globalization, The Quiet Ones is a grimly humorous take on a soul-sapping, multi-billion-dollar industry. In interlocking narratives, it explores lives rendered mute by irate callers, scripted apologies, and life’s menial violence, but which manage to talk back every now and then, just as long as the Mute button is firmly pressed. Winner, 2017 Palanca Grand Prize Winner, 2018 NBDB and Manila Critics Circle National Book Award

A Novel

The Quiet Ones

Regret: it felt rhythmic, like a mild but endless asthma attack. Regret rippled from core to the fringes.

He took certain comfort in this, telling himself that each memory was another moment he would share with her, another vicarious breath she'd take.

How to tell him that it would get better, that it would pass? A child who could only inhabit the present, with no idea of a future, its relief.

His firm acceptance of things was something he had always cherished as a virtue, a form of strength, but it was unprecedented, this hunch that his life was now scarcely one, and it confirmed what all of literature had preached, ultimately: things could just fall apart; it was an inherent capacity. 

At the hotel, he discovered that loneliness and regret, things that otherwise noisily grated, assumed a certain silence when muffed by material comfort. Loneliness didn't snore or shift if one slept on three hundred thread-count Egyptian cotton. Regret chewed quietly during thousand-peso meals. They were there, nonetheless: saying something desultory about the late night news, wishing him good night before he turned off the bedside lamp ("Good night!" Alvin would sing-song back). 

Something happened when one was alone for too long. A wasting, a peeling off, like the duhat tree outside his window that remained standing even as its leaves had all but wilted. To be sure there was peace, too, a kind of joy, in this inward turn, but weren't a lot of things—ennui, disinterest, nothingness—like peace. 

"What is a city without inhabitants? You see? Nothing but plains and hills and rivers. Or flood plains and esteros. But look at me. I've been living in Manila for, what, three years? I won't feel at home in Seattle if I return. I will probably not return, to be perfectly honest. You see? The city is not a place. It is a social," he paused, "arrangement. Defined by concession. By consensus. It is us. A city ends when there are no longer people to define it."

One moment, you're convinced he was brilliant, the next, you wondered if it was all just eloquent bullshit.

"Moving from one place to another, meeting people then saying goodbye to them. Then meeting new ones again. Being, you know, placeless."

"I thought you're no longer seeing each other?" She raised her hand. "Listen to what I will say, OK? Are you listening? OK. Until someone leaves you and then you have to work as a toll booth operator in the middle of SLEX at 3 o'clock in the morning, you don't know—you have absolutely no clue—how it feels to be lonely." 

"So, talking about coffee," Scott said now, "I've been thinking, when we 

 shed off something and we just don't shed that thing off, you know, we also shed 

 which anchored us onto it. Our favorite components, you know? Bitterness in coffee. Cheap pubs in a city. Brilliance in a beloved."

"Ha!" he cried. "But seriously, it's all about that now, no? Anchors. In a world where distance is a function not so much of miles but sheer willingness, that's what we need, that's what we aspire for. Well, most of us, at least. It's the antithesis to placelessness."

Scott's scalp, I remembered, smelled like newly cut grass with a hint of sunburn. A sun you could inhale.

I had always wondered why most of the precolonial Visayan chieftains just capitulated to the Spanish who, arriving ashore exhausted and hungry, must have cautiously demanded, "Bow to the King of Spain!" Were they intimidated by the ships? The mortars and armors? I could almost imagine the datus, tattooed and copper-skinned and swathed in copious gold, looking at each other askance and shrugging, "Sure." Was it this brightness in the white men's skin? Was it an intuitive awe—part curiosity, part admiration—over the Other? I felt a deep urge to run my hand down Scott's cheeks, the prickly five o'clock stubble on his chin. Was it their size, their heft? The warm promise of their shoulders and arms. Was it the lips that could utter something foreign yet familiar at once?

I laid my head on his shoulder. He stirred, and for a moment I feared that he was going to disengage, but he only shifted to welcome my arrival.

"You know what they say about nostalgia?" 

"Maybe God gave you guys such beautiful singing voices so you could sing so magnificently of the tragedies in your lives."

All along the swirl of conversation, questions and answers, observations and defense, explanations, clarifications, as if, in showing him around Manila, I was also introducing myself, which of course I was.

"What we have, Alvin, what we have is better than real."

"The possible is always better than the real."

If you had to say that, you no longer were, I wanted to say.

An errant thought: look, Scott, the city on your face.

Back on his futon, he was watching my face, perhaps in search of a flicker of recognition, maybe even nostalgia,that social disease. Exhausted, I allowed my lips to soften to a smile. The sight, once so familiar and distressing. How many times had I arrived here unannounced to find the sheets ruffled a certain away, the sheets warm with a presence, the scent of a stranger in the air? Then the dragging discussions on monogamy, the palliative beer, the balm of long walks and fucking.

His skin was warm. I turned to him. His face, covered up in gauze in spots, was filled with red lines, a face being uprooted from youth and resisting. He smiled, and I fumbled for things to say. We'd had too many beers, too much of the city, of each other, again.

i think there's beauty in how this story shifted from a heist-like narrative to the mundane everyday life of the characters, especially of the filipino working class. i did enjoy parts in which the writing stood out to me :) sir glenn diaz was my professor during my freshie year and ofc i expected nothing less from a palanca winner! 

however, with that, i do think i should've expected it would be a difficult read. it was a challenge for me getting through this book. in a way, sadly, i only finished it for the sake of finishing it. i think it's brilliant, yes, and remarkable in how it narrates both the manila and province life, but even though the places that were talked ahout here were oh so familiar to me, i felt detached. maybe because of the big words? the begrudgingly long descriptions? either way, it's not so bad. i recognize i'm just not the audience for this and that doesn't take away from sir glenn's writing skills. to write something like this is still a feat i can't even begin to imagine achieving.

moreover, the thought-provoking topics that were tackled here, such as loneliness, filipino joy, placelessness, queer and changing love, were all very important to me and i will remember these passages vividly.

definitely a read to remember! maybe i'll be able to appreciate it more when i read it again in the far future.

i think there's beauty in how this story shifted from a heist-like narrative to the mundane everyday life of the characters, especially of the filipino working class. i did enjoy parts in which the writing stood out to me :) sir glenn diaz was my professor during my freshie year and ofc i expected nothing less from a palanca winner! 

however, with that, i do think i should've expected it would be a difficult read. it was a challenge for me getting through this book. in a way, sadly, i only finished it for the sake of finishing it. i think it's brilliant, yes, and remarkable in how it narrates both the manila and province life, but even though the places that were talked ahout here were oh so familiar to me, i felt detached. maybe because of the big words? the begrudgingly long descriptions? either way, it's not so bad. i recognize i'm just not the audience for this and that doesn't take away from sir glenn's writing skills. to write something like this is still a feat i can't even begin to imagine achieving.

moreover, the thought-provoking topics that were tackled here, such as loneliness, filipino joy, placelessness, queer and changing love, were all very important to me and i will remember these passages vividly.

definitely a read to remember! maybe i'll be able to appreciate it more when i read it again in the far future.

★★★★ // what an interesting novel that looks like a story about a heist on the surface, but actually more of the bits and pieces, past and present, of the people involved. in each and every story, no matter how brief or excruciatingly detailed, i pick up something to ponder on. things that stood out to me were:

(1) alvin and scott and their recurring conversations about placelessness, anchors, and that which ties us to the world; the constant exertion and defamiliarization from a beloved, and the thin line that just won’t give.

(2) carolina and rey and the promise of a life-changing romance, for once finding a refuge — a home — in the midst of placelessness. yet still comes the years of unbecoming and being undone, and love changing.

(3) eric and gene and love being bigger than just the self, the anchor that could not stay yet still stays in you forever

the story is set at a time when call centers and BPOs are starting to boom in the country. in the face of the rapid growth of the industry, the individual starts to become one of the many shoulders that bear the weight of capitalism. we forget that these people have stories and lives that stretch back and forward. so it isn’t really a book about a heist. it’s a story about these lives that dissolve the moment they step foot in these airconditioned rooms, assume a different identity for days, and talk to people halfway around the world who don’t even know their face.

in one scene here, alvin had just started in the company and had to deal with an angry customer. his supervisor took over in his stead. once the issue was resolved, his supervisor told him not to worry because the caller cannot possibly harm him. the caller does not even really know him because they’re miles away. he’s safe. a double-edged sword: one that promises anonymity and security, but one that also makes you realize that you are replaceable because you are just one of the many people who answers a call.

other than a few confusing language use and noticeable inconsistent tone, i think this is a pretty solid book. oftentimes a bit scary because of my familiarity with the places mentioned, the fact that i also worked in the BPO industry, and the stretches of doubts about myself and the struggle to constantly find meaning in what i do.


  “anchors. in a world where distance is a function not so much of miles but of sheer willingness, that’s what we need, that’s what we aspire for. well, most of us, at least. it’s the antithesis to placelessness.”


what is the tie that anchors me to this world?

Borrowing a morsel of Woolf's opinion on Howards End (and I say this tentative, vague, with little self-confidence, merely by intuition), this book was written with so much responsibility. Diaz rehearsed astounding, inimitable range of novel writing in his inaugural work (which made it amusing however personally challenging). Its ethos, not missing a beat, its verisimilitude/circumstantiality perfervidly compelling, wanton, lush but certainly never superfluous. One thing I didn't expect from Diaz was his humor, every quip was risible—every throwaway query/sentiment scathingly saddening. Each of his work is an assertion of my college courses' simple assertion in literature (at least what I think they do), novels and histories are inseparable. To quote Gemino, “Memory is Imagination's heartland.”

The Quiet Ones A Novel