F. Sionil Jose
New from the Phlippines' most distinguished author:
Will be reviewed as soon as I get my copy.
Don Vicente - Two Novels by F. Sionil Jose. From the New York Times by
David Walton: "I think that I was born on a day God was fast
asleep,'' says the landowner's son who brings
the Philippine novelist F. Sionil Josˇ's vivid
Rosales saga into the years following World War II.
''Don Vicente'' combines ''Tree'' and ''My
Brother, My Executioner,'' the second and third of
the five novels in this series, and each depicts a
privileged son awakening to social justice. The town
of Rosales, once the center of the rice trade in
eastern Luzon, is now impoverished. The boy in
''Tree'' witnesses a series of tragedies and
humiliations that cause him to despise his father,
overseer for Don Vicente Asperri, the wealthiest landholder in the province. In the second
story, Luis Asperri, a young writer and editor who is Don Vicente's natural son, is taken
from his peasant mother as soon as he shows promise, and educated in Manila. Vic, Luis's
half brother, has adopted the identity of a legendary guerrilla, and the brothers meet now as
allies and as adversaries. Josˇ's storytelling is direct and accessible, his characters and story
lines drawn together by the symbol of the great balete tree that stands in the center of
Rosales, ''a guardian over the land and our lives, immemorial like our griefs.''
Sins by F. Sionil Jose,
Random House, 1996. I couldn't put this book down. It's like a
jigsaw puzzle, reading in between the lines who's who in Philippine politics are
depicted in the novel. It's basically the life story of the obscenely rich partriarch
who on his deathbed recalls his loves, the ones he lost and yearned for. It's
a tale of the steady degredation of our beloved country. It merited a one page
review (by Pico Iyer) in the NY Times Book Book Review. " ... set in the Philippines,
this amorality tale shadows a rake's impenitent progress ..."
From the book: "F. Sionil Jose is a bookseller, editor and publisher of the journal Solidaridad; founding president of the Philippines PEN Center; and an author published in twenty-four languages but only lately in the United States."
Order Sins now.
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.
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
Three Filipino Women
Published by Random House in 1992
This book was the first book I've read written by
F. Sionil Jose. It just blew me away. The book is actually a collection of three short novellas
about three women from the Philippines. Their stories are very familiar to us Filipinos but Jose wrote them
in such a way that your are reading about the Philippines - troubled, beautiful, victimized. It was because of
this book that I then searched for more Filipino authors published in the West. It was an incredible search
actually because I found a lot. Ninotscka Rosca. Jessica Hagedorn. Peter Bacho. Marianne Villanueva to name
a few. And the list keeps on growing.
Three Filipino Women is out of print right now but if you order it, amazon.com promises to look for it. Order it now!
More about the Philippines' most celebrated author:
- F. Sionil Jose - Odyssey - documentary about the author
- About F. Sionil Jose
- The Works of F. Sionil Jose
