Dogeaters

Jessica Hagedorn · ★★★★

A fascinating collage of voices which sum to create an impression of Philippine life in the 50s and 60s. Violence abounds, of course, and the outsized influence of an American Eden (something I've noticed has persisted in Spain despite all evidence to the contrary), but the voices that really pull this story through are the stand-ins for Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Portraying their insistent blindness to wealth disparity and the indignancy with which they justified their lives will never get old - a more cynical take on the emperor's new clothes tale. Hagedorn layers real news articles and documentary transcripts over a fictional collaboration with a multiplicity of characters who fill in the cityscape she wants to portray. A city of people who just need to get by, find an edge, and survive longer though thriving is not in the conversation for most of them. It is a noirish landscape of desperation and at the top, the most successful takers are mere refractions of the city's underbelly. This is a great novel and its style works really well to its ends. While I may have felt a bit overwhelmed at first, the prose is so polished that it was easy to work through the opening chapters and relax into the swirl of quick chapters which build a narrative out of thematic lines more than directly out of plot. Also fun to see Rainer Werner Fassbender show up as a character. For all I know of Filipino history he was there during the same pivotal moment of the novel, I'll have to look it up. The novel made me curious to about the Philippines and I came away fascinated by this period of history with a feeling that I had experienced a lived portion of it. The prose and literary construction of this novel is masterful, though, so even without a starting interest in the subject matter Hagedorn's weaving of style and content and the conceits she came up with for this novel are fantastic and a pleasure to read.