Three Filipino Women - Hardcover

Jose F. Sionil

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067941360X ISBN 13: 9780679413608

Publisher: Random House, 1992

Synopsis

Three novellas--including Obsession, Platinum, and Cadena de Amor--examine the Philippine experience through the lives of three female characters, a prostitute, a student activist, and a politician. 10,000 first printing.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

Filipino novelist Jos‚ makes his US debut with these three novellas--ostensible love stories that are also vehicles for indictments of contemporary Filipino politics and culture. Each is a tale of disappointed love, of men catching but never able to keep the women they love in a setting where corruption is endemic and Filipino nationalists struggle to promote a national identity under assault from both the US and Japan. In ``Cadeno De Amor,'' Eddie analyses the rise of Narita Reyes, a childhood friend, whom he was later to advise in her successful political campaigns. Driven by her desire to escape the humiliations of her childhood poverty, Narita marries well and is soon a prot‚g‚ of her wealthy father-in-law, who funds her Senate campaign--an expensive business, for, as Eddie notes, everyone from journalists to local officials must be bribed. Even Eddie, who loves her, begins to believe ``that nothing much could be done about our political malaise until she had real power.'' And when the elected Narita dies in a bizarre accident, the ``mythmakers'' are ready. It is still politics as usual. In the second story, ``Obsession,'' a wealthy Filipino business man is in love with the enigmatic prostitute Ermi, who defends her way of life and decision to marry an American by asking him whether she ``has ever stolen from anyone like those big people whom you know and serve.'' The young protagonist of the third piece, ``Platinum,'' loves and loses beautiful Malu--a young woman of good family who's at ease only when ``trying to help people'' and who, wanting to do something useful with her life, becomes a member of an underground guerilla movement, then dies in a raid. Schematically awkward but redeemed by vivid local color, and imbued with a palpable but unsentimental concern for the author's country. A promising introduction. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Until now, the work of Jose, an author ( My Brother, My Executioner ), editor and head of the Manila PEN center, has been all but unavailable in the U.S. The novellas in this collection purport to explore the character of a Filipina and, by extension, the nation: Narita in "Cadena de Amor," who rises to power from provincial origins; Ermi in "Obsession," who leaves her career as an expensive call girl to marry a rich American; and Malu in "Platinum," who dares to live up to her ideals as a political activist. More vivid than the women, however, are the men who tell their stories, hard-edged characters who take for granted the tangles of personality and sexuality permeating modern-day Manila's politics-and business-as-usual. Nontheless, each hopes for a transcendent experience with the woman who fascinates him--but cannot escape the sense of his own corruption, "the onslaught of the malaise that had battered most of us, the dishonesty, the deceit that pervaded public life." Unable to connect except sexually, the men regard the women like children before a candy store, alternately tantalized and frustrated. Readers, in turn, will be tantalized by these glimpses of lives led on the margins of the elite. Jose's elegiac tone complements his narratives of the loneliness and loss that accompany disillusionment.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 067941360X
• ISBN 13: 9780679413608
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176