McLaren, John (1998) Between repression and revolution - F. Sionil José: The Rosales novels. UNSPECIFIED. (Unpublished)

Abstract

Contains a review of Francisco Sionil José’s five-novel series, the Rosales novels, which provides a fictionalised history of the modern Philippines from the revolts of the 1890’s to the Marcos regime of the 1980’s. José novels track the resistances and corruptions of a traditional society responding to the pressures of modernism. They follow the fortunes of peasants enduring on the land or seeking escape in the city, of graduates returning from study abroad only to become entwined in the cycle of corruption, landlords and tycoons deploying their wealth like generals their troops, of priests in the slums and of revolutionaries in the mountains. At their centre is the constant sense of lives deformed by complicity in power or finding their true shape by resistance to it.

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