For an unvarnished view of Philippine society, this, I would think, is hard to beat. While it is challenging to keep up with the constant shifts of story line and perspective, the resulting disorientation is part of what makes the book so compelling. You are forced to confront so many disparate lives, so many incongruous roles that a single individual is forced to play, so great a divide between segments of society, so many lies, so much glamour, juxtaposed against so much cruelty and abuse, along with all the resulting chaos and despair.

My only criticism is that I found the first person voices a little hard to discriminate. I was often several pages into a chapter before I was sure whose voice I was meant to be hearing. I would blame my lack of focus, but I have read other books with shifts as abrupt as this one in which the author was able in a few sentences to make the next narrator's personality and perspective easily distinguishable from any other. Overall, though, well worth it.

This one is a really rough one to pin down. There are so many elements here that I want to love, and plenty others that left me feeling underwhelmed.

I'm a big fan of an ensemble cast, and I really enjoyed the pacing here as we switched from group to group, despite the fact that I felt a few characters didn't get enough time in the spotlight, or finally did get to be highlighted too late in the game.

I liked learning so much about the history and culture of the Philippines and Manila, and I think Hagedorn paints everything vividly.

I definitely felt like I rode an emotional rollercoaster in several scenes, which always wins a few points.

What I didn't like was just how convoluted so much of this was. Sometimes we'd linger on elaborate details and other times it felt like I was wasting time with an unnecessary dream sequence. There was some weird stuff going on with narrative voice with Joey Sands spending a good amount of his time in the book writing in the first person until suddenly it switches to third person. If it's meant to be representative of his mental state at the time, the change didn't work so well when so many other portions of the book are solely in the third person.

I don't know. The ending was also a little underwhelming (sorry but Rio was one of the least interesting figures in the book and I didn't really have any investment in what she was up to) and left us with so many characters at interesting points in their lives only to let the narratives drop off entirely. Was that the point?

Hagedorn excels at atmosphere, and I really enjoyed plenty of moments here, but ultimately I felt a little unsatisfied. Giving it 4 stars because what I liked, I liked a lot.

I read this in the basis of Marlon James selecting it as as one of his five favorite novels. I see we he likes it so much. In telling the story of the late 20th century Philippines, the author takes a very James-ian approach of telling the story through many distinct characters’ perspectives and voices. It also approaches it from several different time frames, principally the late 1950s and the the Marcos era of the early to mid-1980s. The characters cover a wide range of contemporary Manilans from street hustlers, to working stiffs, to the holders and children of privilege and their corrupt military enablers as they navigate the Phillipines’ first extended experience of affluence and independence and try to work through developing an autonomous identity after hundreds of years of colonization by the Spanish and then Americans. All the characters rang true to me and the author portrays them with a liveliness and sympathy that I found completely winning even in the face of the violence and betrayal they visit upon one another.

this was more of an experience than a story. a person shouldn’t focus too much on the plot, rather they should focus on the experiences and feelings that this jumbled and chaotic book offered.

even though it was absolutely mayhem in this group of high class arrogance and low class desperation shown through many characters, as a filipino, i related closely to the themes and messages that Hagedorn portrayed. The obsession towards the Western culture while being scornful of our native history, the rotten indulgences and corruption when living in the city, the mindless acceptance of powerlessness within the lower class, the disregard for community within a fragmented society, the influences of the Philippines’ history of colonisation and identity erasure on our society.

this book is not for everyone. however, i think this was the reason why i was able to stick with the book, especially since it made sure i wasn’t straying or losing interest by changing its story so abruptly and crazily every chapter. i also liked the ending, as it gave way to suspicions of an unreliable narrator, along with endings that didn’t share what happened with certain characters like Joey. i liked this since it definitely reflects reality, in that with some people, you just drop relations and you never know what happens with them at the end. it brings home this realisation that everyone is living their own colourful life that we absolutely have no access too. this myriad of colorful lives portrayed in this book ultimately reflects Manila, i think - even though it is a city filled with filth and dirt, it is also filled with emotion and passion and the human experience of just…living. this book filled me with melancholy, nostalgia and discomforting familiarity at the ugly truth.

i loved this. thank you Jessica Hagedorn for such a beautiful piece of Filipino literature and for being my first Filipino author.

This was a beautifully intense book that often bordered on the surreal. I loved the way it was written, in a series of interconnecting vignettes that captured so much of a city, a country, and a culture. Dogeaters captured the myriad ways the colonial legacy of both Spain and America influenced the Philippines, from the obsession with Hollywood and American movie stars to the way a grandmother is considered aristocratic because she lives in Spain and refuses to speak anything but Castilian Spanish. The atmosphere was beautifully wrought, from the 'pinakbet with bitter-melon, squash, okra, and stringbeans stewed with cloves of garlic, bits of pork fat, and salty fermented shrimp bagoong' to the Rita Hayworth-esque tints Dolores Gonzaga puts in her hair.

And even better than the atmosphere were the many characters populating this book. They run the gamut from a 'war baby' gay prostitute to a social-climbing teenager whose fair skin is her currency. Among my favorites were Rio Gonzaga, the ten year old daughter of a wealthy family who details all the goings-on with frank eyes, the aforementioned gay prostitute Joey Sands, and Daisy Avila, a beauty queen turned freedom fighter.

This story was gorgeously written, and it utilized so many interesting literary techniques. An interrogation scene was interspersed with bits of dialogue from a radio soap opera, but the interrogation was written in parentheses and a smaller font, making the sugary sweet romantic soap opera mask this episode of governmental brutality. What a truly incredible book.

I thought it was really poetic about class disparities, gender, sexuality, exploitation of workers and labor to get somewhere other than where they were. White supremacy and adherence to whiteness destroyed these people's lives.

What an indelibly sexy political masterpiece. Reading Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters has been a mind-blowing and delightful experience for it was nothing short of innovative. In fact, it was the first Filipino literary work I have ever read. A non-chronically narrative made up of vignettes, personal letters, news articles, tabloid stories, archives, and dreams, Dogeaters features the myriad colourful and problematic characters from all walks of life who lives under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos: powerful men with their families, house servants, movie stars, waiters, and bakla. Yet, at the center of it is Rio Gonzaga, who now lives in America, reminiscing her precocious, nostalgic coming-of-age. To reiterate the stories of these interesting characters - even the gist of it - is certainly out of question. Thus, as usual, I would like to have a go at executing a thematic analysis here.
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In essence, Dogeaters is a potent reimagination of the Philippine history, from the Spanish colonisation to the American conquest, from the Second World War to the post-independence, and eventually the Marcos presidency. The neo-colonial society as painted in the book is a class- and race-conscious one, which can be deemed the disturbing and irreversible legacy of decades of colonialism in which ex-masters worked to Christianise the “unenlightened”, “uncivilised”, “dog-eating” natives of the archipelago. Beneath the conspiratorial missionary work is the sinister mechanism of white gaze and the self-serving justification called white man’s burden that altogether operates to enforce Filipino stereotypes. Effects of colonialism are observed in several prominent aspects, including language, thinking and mannerism, politics, socio-cultural practices (race and class, gender and sexuality), and religion. In-betweenness is not only hybrid, but also a state of confrontation between old and new, i.e. established traditions and rules and imported thoughts and practices. It is a love-hate relationship marked by embraces and clashes, negotiation and reconciliation, acceptance and negation.
That explains the occasional remarks by characters that reflect their disdain for native culture as well as that for Western culture, particularly the American one. They perceive the former as a foreign subject and yearn for the latter, feeling simultaneously at home and not so. Sometimes they do otherwise. State of partial displacement proves to be a detriment to the process of meaning making and representing oneself. The majority - if not all - of these characters has a hard time making sense of things happening within the familiar yet strange geo-political terrain and socio-cultural environment which they have called home all this while. Such a phenomenon which inevitably brings about a series of contradictory feelings - desire and yearning, discontent, frustration and disappointment, insecurity and fear, shame and antagonism - drives some to leave the motherland and search for belonging and freedom elsewhere. To some extent, self-imposed exile that is. Cultural and economy, along with state censorship and religion, not only benefit the American administration, but also the dictator and his cronies. They collectively make a state apparatus that aims to shape its citizens into an ignorant, docile population who are merely into a capitalistic hedonistic lifestyle, and to distract them from urgent issues. Nevertheless, as time goes by, some come to be aware of the illusionary state they have been trapped within. As they see through the self-seeking statecraft, they begin their journey to fight back and reclaim their long-lost autonomy.
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In terms of representation, female characters are gendered subjects born out of gendered formation, an intersectional one results from the aforesaid contexts. The juxtaposition between those who succumb to the male gaze and traditional femininity and those who reject it entirely is especially worth noting. The latter are the ones who are perfectly aware of the role of toxic masculinity, authoritarianism, and religion played in exploiting their bodies and minds through both sexual and verbal abuse. They courageously make use of their restricting circumstances to achieve agency. Inhabited within a limiting socio-political, domestic space, their bodies not only prove to be full of gossip and secrecy, but also full of life-changing potential. For these are the bodies that are going to upend and dismantle the powerful’s house.

A whirlwind of a novel. Short chapters that rotate through points of view make this a complex, vivid depiction of the Philippines under the dictator. But the book isn't simply lambasting the late dictator, but also the Americanized culture around him that perpetuated the rampant greed and self-delusion.

I read this once before for my MFA thesis research, and I re-read it now for my PhD comprehensive exams. What struck me this time around was just how much is made of the characters' gender and sexuality. Some of the most sympathetic characters are part of the LGBTQ+ community, experiencing moments of their gender being reaffirmed or denied. Sex—in all its messy iterations—seeps from every interaction.

"Dogeaters was the most perfect distillation of Jamaican society, sexuality, and politics I have ever read," writes Jamaican Marlon James, and then concedes what a trick that is for a book about the Philippines. That observation could have come from authors of a number of nations, I think, because there is something universal about Dogeaters even when it is delving its deepest into the specifics of cultural weirdness. The novel's very first scene is familiar to just about everybody: after a trip to the movies, teenagers engage in obnoxious mating rituals at a nearby café. But slowly, a potentially banal scene is infused with details upon details reflecting power structures based on class, race, and gender that don't quite fit with those that the (American at least) reader is likely to be familiar with.

What looks like it's going to be a straightforward coming-of-age-among-my-eccentric-family story suddenly explodes into much more, and Hagedorn manages to capture an entire politically unruly society within relatively few pages. She populates her Philippines with dozens of celebrities, politicians, power brokers, businesses, a criminal underworld (complemented by a non-so-under-world) and more, a few of whom had such historical verisimilitude on the page that I felt compelled to Google their names to make sure that they weren't real.

This was my read the world selection for the Philippines.

Dogeaters is a derogatory Filipino term referring to those who supposedly eat dogs instead of pork and chicken. That said, this book is told almost in a series of vignettes and covers characters that run the gamut of society from The President and The First Lady (it’s not too hard to imagine who these characters may be based on), through to prostitutes.

What they all have in common is a level of corruption and the story takes a look into societal issues, excesses and the role of western influence.

This really sounds like it should have been right up my alley, as I love an examination of society but this one fell flat for me. For me, there were too many characters that weren’t explored enough. They would pop up in one chapter/vignette and then reappear much later when you could barely remember who they were and what was significant about them.

As more and more characters were introduced (who incidentally were not linked with other characters for the most part), I became less and less invested in the book until about halfway through where I just had no interest left in the story. It felt more like it expressed themes than told a story or portrayed robust characters - or maybe that was just completely my own take as I no longer cared

I read this book as an undergrad and basically remembered NOTHING about it. nothing stuck. rereading it now, I was again underwhelmed, although the last two chapters (2 pp each) were phenomenal. although I think sudden revelations of narrator unreliability should be used advisedly, and this one seemed kind of weird since it wasn't clear how much of the book was supposed to have been narrated by Rio, and I had no real grasp of her as a character until right before the end, when she talks about her relationship to home. up to that point, the whole book felt very surface-level (although the food porn was quality). there's all this intense stuff happening, but it's all disjointed, and I never felt that invested in any one character, but maybe that's the point. but like, Romeo and Trinidad? they were kind of crucial to everything, but just dropped in and out. eh, I don't know.

i know i’m supposed to be in love with this book because it has a lot of socio-cultural and political underpinnings (therefore making me feel that loving this book is the politically correct thing to do), but this just wasn’t *it* for me. if this was written in order to ‘document’ the ML time, albeit in a rather unusual manner, then congrats on a job well done — it shows its readers that while ML was a good time for the M family’s cronies and the M family themselves, it was unfortunately a bad time for those below them (whether or not they were against the former), as they tried so hard to pick crumbs up from the rich & famous above them. however, if this was supposed to be a didactic thing, then it has failed immensely because there is no way in hell that a person who does not care about philippine politics/a person who is not in a humanities program is reading this. i mean, cool, it’s definitely a work you can appreciate form-wise. hagedorn has excellent control of taglish and occasional spanish (exposing the social classes as well as the levels of education attained by her ever-changing narrators). furthermore, her imagery can be quite vivid, so you can take inspiration from that as a writer. on the other hand, it is unfortunately also such a snooze fest that will take you forever to read through, and it strangely feels so draggy even though this is supposedly just a short read.

i’m only giving it 3 stars because my degree program allows me to appreciate and intellectualize texts like this, but i promise you that my non-academic self (or anyone who isn’t in the humanities) would only give this 1 or 2 stars.

can you write a thesis (or any important paper for that matter) about this? definitely. there is so much to unpack and there are various lenses that you can use for analysis.

should you read it for fun? nope. not at all..… unless, of course, your concept of fun is falling asleep in the middle of reading every chapter.