Dusk
Dusk
A novel by the Philippines' most celebrated novelist - F. Sionil Jose.
Published by the Modern Library, May 1998.
Ordering Information
The opening novel of the critically acclaimed "Rosales Saga", a triumphant cycle
that captures 100 years of tumultuous Philippine history and can be compared to
Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude". Published in time for 1998's
nationwide Philippines-USA festival.
I finally read this book in two days in the bus while going to and coming from work. It's a beautifully hewn story about a simple man from the Ilocos region who got caught in the tumultuous events that shaped the Philippines during the turn of the century: the Philippine Revolution against Spain and the Filipino American War. Lots of images still haunt me after I finished the book because I was brought to the part of Philippine history which I really don't know much about. Reading the story is like rediscovering and living in our past. It's a very sensual, even tactile experience.
If you are really interested in your heritage, this is one book you need to read. It's fiction, but that's ok - because everything is based on what could be our reality since erased in our consciousness.
Praise for F. Sionil Jose:
"The foremost Filipino novelist in Englis, his novels deserve a much wider readership than the Philippines can offer. His major work, the Rosales Saga, can be reas as an allegory for the Filipino search of an identity." - Ian Buruma, The New York Review of Books
"America has no counterpart ... no one who is simultaneously a prolific novelist, a social and political organizer, an editor and journalist, and a small-scale entrepreneur ... As a writer, Jose is famous for two bodies of work. One is the Rosales sequence, a set of five novels published over a twenty-year span which has become a kind of national saga ... Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, published in Spanish (despite its Latin title) in the late nineteenth century, was an influenctial Uncle Tom's Cabin-style polemic about Spanish rule. The Rosales books are a more literarily satisfying modern equivalent." - James Fallows, The Atlantic
"One of the [Philippines'] most distinguished men of letters." - Time
"Tolstoy himself, not to mention Italo Svevo, would envy the author of this story ... this short ... schorching work whets our appetite for Sionil Jose's masterpiece, the five-novel Rosales Saga." - Joseph Coates, Chicago Tribune.
"Considered by many to be Asia's most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature. - The Singapore Strait Times
F. Sionil Jose's Bibliography - from Amazon.com's inventory
