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F. Sionil Jose, whose work has been published in twenty-four languages, is also a bookseller, editor, founding president of the Philippines PEN Center, and a former publisher of the journal Solidarity. He has taught most recently at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives in Manila.
The second volume of the Filipino author's celebrated Rosales Saga, whose initial volume Dusk appeared here last year, following such unrelated fiction as Three Filipino Women (1992) and Sins (1996). Jose's oeuvre, however, appears to be only too uniform: an ongoing song in praise of Filipino nationalism and independence, and a scathing indictment of these islands' Spanish, Japanese, and American oppressors and occupiers. His fiction is thus of very uneven quality: a deeply felt love of the land and its traditions, communicated through vivid characterizations and dramatic conflicts, and hamstrung by lengthy conversations and monologues in which characters are little more than mouthpieces. Jose's strengths are best seen in the (untitled) first section of this Novel in Two Parts, which relates its nameless narrators gradual alienation from his sheltered life in the village of Rosales (during the 1940s). There, his father manages a plantation, owned by the shadowy absentee figure of Don Vicente, that cruelly exploits native workers. The story is distinguished both by its narrator's eloquently conflicted feelings and by the facility with which Jose creates a rich parade of characters, each embodying some aspect of the struggles of Don Vicente's people to overthrow him. The much weaker (and longer) companion story, My Brother, My Executioner, contrasts the fates of (the selfsame) Don Vicente's natural son Luis, a poet and magazine editor bent on distancing himself from his father's world, and Luis's half-brother Victor, who joins an inchoate peasant revolt against their father's economic empire. Though ridges does make Don Vicente a complex, self-questioning character, his story sinks under the weight of repeated harangues about the rights of the nobility . . . [and] the responsibilities of serfs and related socioeconomic themes. Like the writer he most resembles, Indonesian dissident Primitiae Unhandy Toper, Jobse is both a diligent, gifted chronicler of his country's sorrows and a scold whose tendency toward laxness and diatribe drains his colorful fiction of much of its inherent and expressive power. (Kirkus Reviews)
