Salidum-ay diway : (Sunflower) / Ricardo M. Octaviano.

the cause and purpose is here reasoned out as only a writer with a military background could vividly tell it. --Front cover of the book.

well larded with anecdotes, customs, unwritten practices of the Muslim Filipinos in Mindanao and Sulu, and the Bago, a hill tribe in northern Luzon - the locale of the story. The first 4 chapters are short stories by themselves. A story made appear real: a book in which the characters are carefully realized. The hero, Odiong, an orphaned mountain lad went to live in the lowland and later migrated to Manila to seek an appointment with destiny. He found lodgement in the city living with a barony family. How he pursued a career, a city career that slowly guttered out relates the ambitions of a youth whose life became entangled with the destiny of an old, decadent society, a moribund society gasping its agonizing sigh of decay. Lured from his studies by drug addicts, hitched to a notorious narcotics syndicate, he droned away the precious years of youth. Odiong also married young only to lose a wife, the legendary Sulidum-ay, and left an only child fending for herself. He became a student activist locked in as a communist fief, and, then, spewed up in the fury of a social volcano, the rebellion that led to the proclamation of martial law in the Philippines in 1971. Why a foreign ideology with a revolutionary outlook has an appeal to a gentle youth

SALIDUM-AY DIWAY is a story that grips the reader, a narration dripping with sentiments