Dogeaters

by Jessica Hagedorn

Overview

“An original, raw, and wild novel that has held its power and demands to be read.” —Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and Winner of the American Book Award

A classic and influential story—often considered “the quintessential Filipino American novel” (The Nation)—centered on the cultural and political stakes of life in Marcos-era Philippines

One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

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 characters—including 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780140149043
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/01/1991
Series:	Contemporary American Fiction Series
Edition description:	Reissue
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	294,630
Product dimensions:	5.07(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.67(d)
Lexile:	860L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Jessica Hagedorn was born and raised in the Philippines and came to the United States in her early teens. Her novels include Toxicology, Dream Jungle, The Gangster Of Love, and Dogeaters, winner of the American Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. She is also the author of Danger And Beauty, a collection of poetry and prose, and the editor of three anthologies: Manila Noir, Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction and Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home In The World.

Table of Contents

DogeatersPart One: Coconut Palace

Love Letters
The King of Coconuts
The White Bouquet
Mister Heartbreak
Jungle Chronicle
His Mother, the Whore
Floating Bodies
Serenade
Tsismis
Sprikitik
Her Eminent Ascent into Heaven
President William McKinley Addresses a Delegation of Methodist Churchmen, 1898
Heroin
Her Mother, Rita Hayworth
High Society
Surrender
Avila Arrested in Human Rights Rally Dispute
Sleeping Beauty
One Christmas in a Mountain Lodge up in Baguio, Date Unknown
Epiphany
Breaking Spells
In the Artist's House
Excerpt from the Only Letter Ever Written by Clarita Avila
Jungle Chronicle

Part Two: The Song of Bullets

The President's Wife Has a Dream
Man with a Mission
Romeo Rosales
Paradise
The Weeping Bride
Last Chance
Dateline Manila
Movie Star
Golf
Insect Bounty
Hunger
Redemption
Jungle Chronicle
The Famine of Dreams
Bananas and the Republic
Terrain
Luna Moth
Pucha Gonzaga

Kundiman

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Dogeaters:

“Hagedorn unwaveringly paints a menacing world, one that should sound an urgent alarm to us now—but the book is so beautiful! It’s painted in the shimmering, fierce, lush colors of memory and longing; it has the radiant evanescence of a dream—and it leaves behind the lingering authority of a dream’s veiled warning.”
—The New York Review of Books

“A surrealistically hip epic of Manila . . . Combines narrative drive with a lyric sensibility.”
—The San Francisco Chronicle

“As sharp and fast as a street boy’s razor . . . a rich small feast of a book.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Dogeaters erupts from its pages, 50 percent voluptuous fever dream, 50 percent heart-stopping nightmare, 100 percent reality. The hallucinatory vision of this colonial world—the crucible of the innocent, the rapacious, the collaborators, the oblivious, the martyred—feels flawless, irrefutable.  Hagedorn writes with exhilarating stylistic dexterity, deep compassion, humor that ranges from gentle and affectionate to fire-breathing, and immense grace.  The book is every bit as astonishing as it was when it first appeared thirty years ago, and unfortunately much more pertinent—a piercing warning signal, now that we have installed a deranged and brutal pseudo-populist dictator in our own country.”
—Deborah Eisenberg, author of Your Duck is My Duck

“Possibly the most brutally, hilariously accurate portrait of post-colonial Jamaica I’ve ever read. And it’s a novel about the Philippines.”
—Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“Unquestionably a classic, Dogeaters is a tour-de-force that remains as relevant and revelatory as it did when it first gut-punched the literary industry 30 years ago. Its restless prose, its collisions of peoples, cultures, and histories, and its resolute memory-keepers, such as Rio, have much left to say about our troubled times.”
—Rigoberto González, author of The Book of Ruin

“Jessica Hagedorn has been an inspiration to me for nearly thirty years, ever since I read Dogeaters. It is as remarkable now as it was then, an original, raw, and wild novel that has held its power and demands to be read.”
—Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer

“A shimmering, ferocious, funny, campy, disturbing, violent, benevolent, dazzling beast of a tale. Dogeaters was a joy to read the first time, but rereading it today made me realize Jessica Hagedorn is the divine mother goddess of novelists.”
—Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street

“Dogeaters is a fine achievement on a very serious scale . . . This is the definitive novel of the encounter between the Philippines and America and their history of mutual illusion, antagonism, and ambiguous affection. It is a rich and satisfying work and certainly among the best novels I have read this year.”
—Robert Stone, author of Dog Soldiers

“I still vividly remember when Dogeaters came out—it was instantly and rightfully hailed a groundbreaking American classic. Jessica Hagedorn has shaped our ways of understanding modern America and reading American literature. Her Dogeaters is indelible, and indispensable in the American canon.”
—Gina Apostol, author of Insurrecto

“Mixing real-life ghouls with phantoms from the past . . . Hagedorn captured that mixture of love, laughter and sadness that stirs in every Filipino's heart. [Dogeaters] is a mournful, obsessive ballad about Filipino lives left in postcolonial disarray.”
—Randy Gener, The New York Times

“[Dogeaters] secur[ed] Hagedorn’s reputation as an important voice in Asian American letters. The narrative style impressed readers as well as critics: a multiple-character point of view that wove American pop icons into the Filipino cultural fabric, it illuminated the chaotic and wondrous post-colonial Manila of the 1950s.”
—Los Angeles Review of Books

“No nonfiction book is likely to capture the cultural psychosis of the Phillippines nearly as well as this exceptiona novel about growing up there.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“Entertaining and compelling. . . . At the end, you emerge from its intense, dreamlike world feeling as if you’ve been to the Philippines.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Hagedorn transcends social strata, gender, culture, and politics in this exuberant, witty, and telling portrait of Philippine society.”
—The San Diego Union

“A tour-de-force debut . . . A kaleidoscopic view of Manila society—high and low—in which sad and sordid realities are tempered by humor and immense vitality . . . A spicy stew of a novel.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“The book succeeds on the strength of its characterization . . . Hagedorn's unflinching view of Manila . . . is leavened by ironic, often humorous observations.”
—Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

Born and raised in the Philippines, poet and playwright Hagedorn sets her first novel in the volatile political climate of that country's recent past. Although in many respects a thinly disguised roman a clef , the book succeeds on the strength of its characterization. Hagedorn ( Dangerous Music ) weaves together the immature impressions of Rio Gonzaga, a spunky well-to-do Manilan schoolgirl whose life is influenced as much by the movies and radio serials as the tsismis (gossip) of her large extended family, with the voices of Joey, a popular DJ and male prostitute; Rainer, a world-weary German film director being honored with a retrospective; and the Philippine's astonishingly candid First Lady, addressed only as Madame, among others. Hagedorn's unflinching view of Manila, encompassing child prostitution, the torture chambers and the slums, as well as the palatial quarters of the First Family, is leavened by ironic, often humorous observations. When the popular opposition leader is slain, each of the characters is directly affected; for some it is a moral awakening, for others the beginning of the end of a stranglehold on power. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This jazzy, sardonic novel depicts the nightmare world that was the Philippines of the Marcoses. Its terrain is familiar to us from the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Manuel Puig: a lush, fantastical, overheated landscape, where the fractured lives of the poor are rendered palatable solely by dreams. Rich and poor, everyone sells something here; everyone has a price. The common dream of a myriad group of characters--bored teenagers, timid shop girls, male prostitutes on the make--is that hollowest of all modern apotheoses, ``stardom.'' A visiting filmmaker, a German degenerate, buys the services of a pretty boy, who soliloquizes: ``I'll have it all worked out, soon. I know I will. I have to. I'll hit the jackpot with one of these guys. Leave town. Get lucky . . . . Soon.'' This is a novel about the death of the good life of the soul: of all virtue, meaning, and hope. Exceptionally well written and emotionally wrenching. Recommended.-- David Keymer, SUNY Inst. of Technology, Utica

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