Synopses & Reviews
The opening novel of the critically acclaimed Rosales Saga, a triumphant cycle that captures one hundred years of tumultuous Philippine history and can be compared to Marquez's One Hundred years of Solitude. Published in time for 1998's nationwide Philippine-USA festival.
With this masterly novel, Jose begins the story of four generations of a Filipino family as it is embroiled in the turbulent history of its nation, a country often colonized and exploited but also culturally vital and vibrant.
A family of tenant farmers is forced to flee its village and run from the local civil guard, led by a young healer. Settling in the small town of Rosales, they work for the chance at a new beginning, but they soon have to make horrific sacrifices in a war that no one wants.
Jose carefully begins to reconstruct a portrait of his country, portraying the terrible physical and emotional hardships the people endure as their country is transformed by the "liberation" from Spanish rule -- and the oppression that remains, even after the Americans take over. Far from drawing a picture of hopelessness, however, Jose has achieved a fiction of extraordinary scope and passion.
Synopsis
With
Dusk (originally published in the Philippines as
Po-on), F. Sionil Jose begins his five-novel Rosales Saga, which the poet and critic Ricaredo Demetillo called "the first great Filipino novels written in English." Set in the 1880s,
Dusk records the exile of a tenant family from its village and the new life it attempts to make in the small town of Rosales. Here commences the epic tale of a family unwillingly thrown into the turmoil of history. But this is more than a historical novel; it is also the eternal story of man's tortured search for true faith and the larger meaning of existence. Jose has achieved a fiction of extraordinary scope and passion, a book as meaningful to Philippine literature as
One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Latin American literature.
"The foremost Filipino novelist in English, his novels deserve a much wider readership than the Philippines can offer."--Ian Buruma, New York Review of Books
"Tolstoy himself, not to mention Italo Svevo, would envy the author of this story."--Chicago Tribune