Actual rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

This play is going to haunt me for a while. A violent dissection of what it means to be Filipino, the power of gossip, and the dark humor of a nation full of sexual violence unfolds in Dogeaters, and the world of 1982 Manila is one impossible to forget. Some of the characters felt underdeveloped, but most of them are fascinating and represent so many interesting areas of life.

Having a Filipino mother and having been in Manila many a time as a young adult, I have to say that this "insiders"book brought me right back to Makati in all its gory, glory! One of those books you wish didn't end. A must read for anyone who loves Manila and the Philippines.

A vibrant, melting, multi-tier cake of a book. Melting under the own weight of its own plot, I was nevertheless entertained by the portrait of the Philippines in the 50s. I'd never read a book about this era before, and Hagedorn's head-hopping lets us get into multiple perspectives on this wild time. Decadence and consumerism are intercut with sadder lives and the plight of people who see an issue with the corrupt government, along with a variety of junkies, hustlers, gay men, beautiful women, and doomed marriages. While the book sagged in the middle trying to keep track of its own cast once the last 15-10% hit I was hooked as everything crossed over in one massive blitz of political machinations. The last three chapters in particular really circled home, and knocked this book back up to 4 stars after the middle section was making me think it was a 3.

I wish I could give this 3.5 stars. I read it as part of the WSJ book club. I actually liked it, and I think it presents a very good portrait of a developing country: the class strata, the dictator, corruption.

The book is slow to develop, and yes, the chapters jump between characters, often with no warning. But I was never confused and ultimately looked forward to certain characters' chapters, especially Joey and Rio.

Catholicism figures prominently in this novel, which can be expected because the Philippines is a mostly Catholic country. But some of the book's characters are not religious at all. Others pretend to be devout, attend church regularly, but live their lives without any concern for what is morally right. On the other extreme, one character is so devout that it isolates her from the rest of society. I think it's a realistic picture of religious practice, especially in a country that was converted to Catholicism through colonial rule.

This wasn't my favorite book of all time, but it's a worthwhile read.

Read for school.

I Wanna B U

People condemned colonialism as being the exploitation of one country by another. The dominant power sucked the resources out of the weaker one, paying only a little back in terms of some technology and a semblance of law and order. But I think now we have realized that that economic bloodsucking was only one of the evils of the imperial experience. More subtle, but maybe longer lasting, was the degrading of the self among the dominated. The ruled felt powerless, they felt their whole culture had failed them and offered nothing of a future, while the West (almost always the dominating powers) remained glamorous, powerful, sexy, and almost unreachable. The dominated peoples shucked off their traditions, rejected their pasts, and tried to become Western. If this is only partly true, it is truer of the elites, who could aspire to local power if they mimicked the real rulers. In the post-colonial era some countries adopted Western institutions to benefit themselves, while others took only the outward forms of the West and used them in corrupt ways. If these remarks hold any relevance to post-colonial society, they are even more true of the Philippines, where America held out a vision of "Americanization"---democracy, education, and pop culture---which could not be delivered in reality in a Southeast Asian peasant society that had lived under loose Spanish control for over 350 years before the Yanks arrived.

DOGEATERS is an achingly realistic portrait of Manila society, where nobody wants to be what they are and everyone wants to be somebody else. Identity comes from trashy Hollywood and Manila movies, soap opera is life. The shopping-obssessed elite rejects everything in their own land. The demi-monde leers around every corner. Phoneyness is next to godliness. The riffraff rule. Everyone survives on the edge. Marginal men become mainstream. Snowy Christmas scenes and "Jingle Bells" greet a holiday, but it's all "out there" somewhere; Manila remains hot and humid, home to a Malayo-Polynesian tradition that is walled off and laughed at by the would-be foreigners that dwell in the vast city. Imelda Marcos, a character in the book, collects her shoes and puts up huge "cultural" monuments that commemorate herself. She has no clue about and no sympathy for the problems of her nation. A thinly-disguised Benigno Aquino gets assassinated and everyone betrays everyone else. Everyone turns out to be marginal in the end.

DOGEATERS starts off in a brilliant way. The first two thirds of the book is exciting and insightful. If you have ever read Vargas Llosa or Lobo Antunes, you will not find Hagedorn at all difficult. Changing narrators and jumping back and forth is part of post-modern literature. Hey, what's so new about that ? I am not at all Filipino, though I have visited that country. OK, I didn't understand most of the Tagalog words tossed into the text without explanation, but you get the sense even so. In the last third, however, the author runs out of ideas. She can't keep up the momentum created through her intense, accurate description of certain classes of Filipino society. The story becomes diffuse and kind of limps across the finish line like "American Graffiti". Still, for anyone who fancies a novel that really opens up a culture quite neglected and unknown in the West, DOGEATERS is a must read.

no wayyyyyyyyy, she also wrote Manila Noir?????? idk y that's news to me

I can’t wait to re read this already. There was so much going on and I’m sure there was a lot of stuff i missed. Grateful to have finally read this masterpiece

At the onset I thought this was a collection of related short stories, and only at about a quarter though it did I realize it was an (at-one-time-at-least) experimental novel. The narration is dense, with a lot of unfamiliar foreign vocabulary and exposition from unreliable narrators. The hustlers and hipsters are quite old hat and only the old-timers have it going on. Everyone's in cahoots and the filthy streets of the underworld are about the most sanitary aspect of the society. Consumerist messages become the only comforting presence, until their sentimentalism and cloying appeal to the good life can no longer cover the sickening stench of the generations of benign neglect and authoritarian oppression that has woven their way so far into the country's collective unconscious that there is simply no room left to seriously contemplate an escape.

I chose this book as a first generation Filipina American, I knew this book took place in the Philippines my parents were born into. This book is about corruption, social discrepancies, poverty and the family dynamic of the Marcos era of the Philippines. Not really sure why it's called Dogeaters. I know very poor people in the Philippines resort to eating dogs, but no one does so in the novel (spoiler/warning: a dog is killed

Interesting

This is an interesting book about the Philippines in the 50's,60's era. It's won the 1990 American Book Award and was a runner up in the National Book Award. It portrayed the human rights abuses of the times, and when reading, one is certainly immersed in the culture and the era. The character development is well done, and it's a relatively fast read. It's one of those books that could benefit a 2 nd reading. For some reason, the pacing was a bit "off", in my opinion. Perhaps because of the historical era. I liked the book, but it's not high on my recommendation list.

This is a pretty good read if you can stomach the atrocious Taglish! "But Togi, it's to ground the setting firmly into Manila and the constant code-switching there while still remaining understandable-" Listen, man. I can only take so many puwede bas and talagas (italicized!) peppered randomly into dialogue before I start thinking of Ateneans speaking. This is a pretty... Fil-Am way of structuring dialogue, considering someone with no knowledge of Tagalog would find the bits of Tagalog unnatural and someone who's familiar with Tagalog would find the ratio of English to Tagalog (like... 9:1) very unnatural, but if you have just a passing understanding of a few keywords, you'd probably think, "Yep, this sure is how human people speak over there". My favorite example of this by far is the line, "Ano ba, pare - did you find this piece of shit in the basura?" Like if you can't handle basically the whole cast speaking like this you're just not gonna have a good time. I'd also like to note that this is essentially a nitpick on Dogeaters, pfft, but one that clearly colored my whole experience of the book if I'm starting the whole goddamn review with it.

There's definitely quite a bit packed in here and a lot of those ends will remain loose till the very end, folks. Mallat snippets, insights into characters here and there with shifts from third person to first person perspective all over the place (I guess the Avila assassination would necessarily have Joey Sands dissociate to the point that his narrative disconnects into third person, but it was pretty jarring having one of the two reliably first-person-written narratives just stop doing that.), dream sequences. I think those last ones were hit or miss iguessyounevermisshuh in terms of how much I feel like they did... something for the narrative, but they tended to be fun. It was less fun to have plots just start up and drop and you sit there going "huh?"

I do appreciate how GUTTINGLY FAMILIAR any scene featuring the Marcoses felt, how lines sounded like they were lifted from actual real-life records despite being essentially historical fiction. They really help you side-eye Rio's storyline, where really, nothing much happens, but Pucha's commentary on the penultimate chapter make you consider how much of what you were just told (especially in her epilogue) was, like, accurate. And the poem that serves as the final chapter is an absolute fucking banger.