Dusk: A Novel (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Read Dusk: A Novel (Modern Library Paperbacks) Online
Authors: F. Sionil Jose
PRAISE FOR F. SIONIL JOSÉ
“The foremost Filipino novelist in English, his novels deserve a much wider readership than the Philippines can offer. His major work, the Rosales Saga, can be read as an allegory for the Filipino in search of an identity.”
—I
AN
B
URUMA
,
The New York Review of Books
“America has no counterpart … no one who is simultaneously a prolific novelist, a social and political organizer, an editor and journalist, and a small-scale entrepreneur.… As a writer, José is famous for two bodies of work. One is the Rosales sequence, a set of five novels published over a twenty-year span which has become a kind of national saga.… José Rizal’s
Noli Me Tangere
, published in Spanish (despite its Latin title) in the late nineteenth century, was an influential
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
-style polemic about Spanish rule. The Rosales books are a more literarily satisfying modern equivalent.”
—J
AMES
F
ALLOWS
,
The Atlantic
“One of the [Philippines’] most distinguished men of letters.”
—Time
“Marvelous.”
—P
ETER
B
ACHO
,
The Christian Science Monitor
“[José] never flattens his characters in the service of rhetoric.… Even more impressive is José’s ability to tell important stories in lucid, but never merely simple prose.… It’s refreshing to see a politically engaged Writer who dares to reach for a broader audience.”
—L
AURA
M
ILLER
,
San Francisco Weekly
“Tolstoy himself, not to mention Italo Svevo, would envy the author of this story.… This short … scorching work whets our appetite for Sionil José’s masterpiece, the five-novel Rosales Saga.”
—J
OSEPH
C
OATES
,
Chicago Tribune
“The literary work of José is inseparable from the modern politics and history of the Philippines.”
—
Le Monde
“José’s writing is simple and direct, appearing deceptively unsophisticated at times. But the stories ring true, and taken together, they provide a compelling picture of the difficulties of modern life and love in this beleaguered island nation.”
—S
TEVE
H
EILIG
,
San Francisco Chronicle
“[José] is the only writer who has produced a series of novels that constitutes an epic imaginative creation of a century of Philippine life … a rich, composite picture.”
—L
EOPOLDO
Y. Y
ABES
,
Contemporary Novelists
“[José is] one of the best and most active writers of contemporary Philippine literature in English.… [H]is stories are moving portraits of Philippine society.”
—J
OSEPH
A. G
ALDON
, S.J.,
Philippine Studies
“In Filipino literature in recent years, the creative work of Francisco Sionil José occupies a special place.… José is a great artist.”
—I
GOR
P
ODBEREZSKY
, Institute of Oriental Studies, Moscow
“The reader of this slim volume of well-crafted stories will learn more about the Philippines, its people, and its concerns than from any journalistic account or from a holiday trip there. José’s book takes us to the heart of the Filipino mind and soul, to the strengths and weaknesses of its men, women, and culture.”
—L
YNNE
B
UNDESEN
,
Los Angeles Times
“Sionil José has the ability to write evocatively … his descriptions of the rural environment have an intense glow and a lyrical shine … truly an emancipated stylist, an interpreter of character and analyst of society.”
—A
RTHUR
L
UNDKVIST
, The Swedish Academy, Stockholm
“[José is] an outstanding saga writer. If ever a Nobel Prize in literature will be awarded to a Southeast Asian writer, it will be to F. Sionil José.”
—The Mainichi Shimbun
(Tokyo)
“Considered by many to be Asia’s most likely candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature.”
—The Singapore Straits Times
“F. Sionil José could become the first Filipino to win the Nobel Prize for literature … he’s a fine writer and would be welcome recognition of cultural achievement in his troubled country. [He] is widely known and acclaimed in Asia.”
—J
OHN
G
RIFFIN
,
The Honolulu Advertiser
“[José] captures the spirit of his country’s sullen and corrupt bureaucracy [and] tells the readers far more about Philippine society than many, far lengthier works of nonfiction.”
—S
TEVE
V
INES
,
South China Morning Post
(Hong Kong)
“The plot [of
Ermita
] is unfolded by concise, vividly picturesque, sometimes humorous, often tender prose. The candor with which Sionil fleshes out his sensuous earthy characters is balanced by his breathtakingly surgical dissection of their minds and souls.”
—N
INA
E
STRADA
,
Lifestyle Asia
“José is one of Asia’s most eminent writers and novelists. His passionate, sometimes transcendent writings illuminate contemporary Filipino life in graceful and historically anchored narratives of power brokers and the brokered, of landowners and the indentured.”
—S
COTT
R
UTHERFORD
,
Islands
Magazine
“He has achieved a unity in his writings such as that seen in William Faulkner in his stories relating to Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi or in the Monterey stories of John Steinbeck.”
—D
OUGLAS
L
E
C
ROY
,
St. Louis University Research Journal
Dusk
is a work of fiction. The characters and events are products of the author’s imagination. Where actual historical persons or incidents are mentioned, their context is entirely fictional
.
Copyright © 1984, 1987, 1992 by F. Sionil José
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Originally published, in English, as
Po-on
by Solidaridad Publishing House, in Manila, Philippines.
The first chapter originally appeared as the short story “The Cripples” in
The God Stealer
(Quezon City, Philippines: R. P. Garcia Publishing Company, 1968).
M
ODERN
L
IBRARY
and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
José, F. Sionil (Francisco Sionil)
[Po-on]
Dusk: a novel / F. Sionil José.
p. cm.
Originally published: Po-on. Manila, Philippines: Solidaridad
Pub. House, [c1984]
eISBN: 978-0-307-83030-2
1. Philippines—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9550.9.J67P6 1998
823—dc21 97-39435
Modern Library website address:
www.modernlibrary.com
v3.1
NOTES ON THE
WRITING OF
DUSK
(
PO-ON
)
W
hen people ask me which of my novels I like best, I always reply, you are asking me which of my seven children I love most.
My Japanese translator, Matsuyo Yamamoto, thinks
Tree
is the most evocative. The poet and critic Ricaredo Demetillo thinks
My Brother, My Executioner
is the most dramatic and
Tree
the dullest. It is really difficult for me to say which is what, but this I can say:
Mass
is the book I enjoyed writing most, because I wrote it straight from beginning to end in one creative spurt. Besides, I wrote it in Paris.
My daughter Jette, who is my editor, thinks
Dusk
(original title,
Po-on
) is the best.
Po-on
, which means “the beginning” or “tree trunk” in my native Ilokano, is the first in terms of chronology.
Of the five Rosales novels,
Dusk
took the longest to write—more than three decades. I had great difficulty, for it meant research into our past, the period from the early 1870s to 1898 and the Battle of Tirad Pass, the same period during which the Spanish regime was vanquished and the Americans took over.
Dusk
is simply the story of a family, or rather of a peace-loving man who led his clan in its flight from the narrow coastal plain of the Ilokos in Northern Luzon to the Central Plains. It is also a story of Spanish tyranny, and the Filipino response to it and to the American intrusion into our islands after the Spaniards left. The man who leads this hegira is the grandfather of Antonio Samson in
The Pretenders
, published in 1962, the first of the five Rosales novels. Four others followed:
Tree
;
My Brother
,
My Executioner
;
Mass
; and
Po-on
(
Dusk
).
All five novels may be read independently of one another, but all are linked, not so much by recurring characters as by their origins in a small Central Luzon town called Rosales. The name is incidental; Rosales can very well be any town in the Philippines. And running through all five novels are the basic themes that have always interested me as a writer: man’s continuing search—often futile, often hopeless—for social justice and a moral order.
It is in
Dusk
where I define the patriot and hero. I do this at a time when heroes in the Philippines are movie stars and socialites turned politicians, soldiers who have betrayed the Constitution, and even returning widows with three thousand pairs of shoes.
The two major characters in
Dusk
are my fictional rendition of Apolinario Mabini, who in real life was the ideologue of the revolution against Spain, and Eustaquio Samson, the young acolyte who flees from the Ilokos with his whole clan.