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A Rare Case Where a Title Should Have Been Censored
Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters (New York: Penguin Group: Classics, November 12, 2024). Softcover: $19.00. 288pp. ISBN: 9780143138-16-7.
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"...Story centered on the cultural and political stakes of life in Marcos era Philippines... Welcome to Manila in the turbulent period of the Philippines' late dictator. It is a world in which American pop culture and local Filipino tradition mix flamboyantly, and gossip, storytelling, and extravagant behavior thrive. A wildly disparate group of charactersincluding movie stars and waiters, a young junkie and the richest man in the Philippines-becomes ensnared in a spiral of events culminating in a beauty pageant, a film festival, and an assassination. At the center of this maelstrom is Rio, a feisty schoolgirl who will grow up to live in America and look back with longing on the land of her youth."
Jessica Hagedorn is a San Francisco-raised author, who has won many awards, and has had much popular success in many genres, including not only poetry, and novels, but also music and films. The first edition of this novel was copyrighted in 1990, and this edition includes a new 2024 introduction by Patrick Rosal.
Rosal's intro is unhelpful as it takes on a conversational tone, chatting about Jessica's and Rosal's families across its first section. The next section attempts to explain the novel, and begins with the abstraction that there are many voices, or "the book is haunted." The characters are inhabited by at times "mythological figures like the Filipino kapre", or "colonizers", or "radio voices reflecting our own desires for love and blood". A few paragraphs later, Rosal gets to "the book's plot, if we're to call it that". "...A political assassination and Joey Sands himself sees the violent event..." But...