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Zusatztext "[José] writes eloquently about his people! their losses and longings . . . [he] lovingly describes the trees! plants and topography of the land that suffuses his books with a natural lyricism." --Michael J. Ybarra! Los Angeles Times Informationen zum Autor F. Sionil José , whose work has been published in twenty-four languages, is also a bookseller, editor, founding president of the Philippines PEN Center, and a former publisher of the journal Solidarity. He has taught most recently at the University of California at Berkeley. He lives in Manila. Klappentext Written in elegant and precise prose! Don Vicente contains two novels in F. Sionil José's classic Rosales Saga. The saga! begun in José's novel Dusk! traces the life of one family! and that of their rural town of Rosales! from the Philippine revolution against Spain through the arrival of the Americans to! ultimately! the Marcos dictatorship. The first novel here! Tree! is told by the loving but uneasy son of a land overseer. It is the story of one young man's search for parental love and for his place in a society with rigid class structures. The tree of the title is a symbol of the hopes and dreams--too often dashed--of the Filipino people. The second novel! My Brother! My Executioner! follows the misfortunes of two brothers! one the editor of a radical magazine who is tempted by the luxury of the city! the other an activist who is prepared to confront all of his enemies! real or imagined. The critic I. R. Cruz called it "a masterly symphony" of injustice! women! sex! and suicide. Together in Don Vicente! they form the second volume of the five-novel Rosales Saga! an epic the Chicago Tribune has called "a masterpiece." Tree CHAPTER 1 This is a journey to the past—a hazardous trek through byways dim and forgotten—forgotten because that is how I choose to regard many things about this past. In moments of great lucidity, I see again people who—though they may no longer be around—are ever present still; I can almost hear their voices and reach out to touch them—my friends, cousins, uncles and aunts, and most of all, Father. My doctor says it is good that I should remember, for in memory is my salvation. I should say, my curse. This, then, is a recollection as well, of sounds and smells, and if the telling is at times sketchy, it is because there are things I do not want to dwell upon—things that rile and disturb because they lash at me and crucify me in my weakness, in my knowledge of what was. So it was—as Father has said again and again—that the boy became a man. I am a commuter, not between the city and the village, although I do this quite frequently; I am a commuter between what I am now and what I was and would like to be, and it is this commuting, at lightning speed, at the oddest hours, that has done havoc to me. My doctor flings at me clichés like “alienation,” “guilt feelings,” and all the urban jargon that has cluttered and at the same time compartmentalized our genteel, middle-class mores, but what ails me are not these. I can understand fully my longing to go back, to “return to the womb”—even the death wish that hounds me when I find it so difficult and enervating to rationalize a middle-aged life that has been built on a rubble of compromise and procrastination. It is this commuting, the tension and knowledge of its permanence, its rampage upon my consciousness, that must be borne, suffered, and vanquished, if I am to survive in this arid plateau called living. At times it can be unbearable, and neither pills nor this writing can calm my mind; but then, I must go on—that is what the arteries and the gonads are for—so I hie back to this past wherefrom I can draw sustenance and the ability to see more clearly how it was and why it is. I was born and I grew up in a small town—any to...
