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4.0 out of 5 stars
"We were raised in a convent, then released into Hollywood", January 1, 2006
This review is from: The Disinherited: A Novel (Hardcover)
When Roger Caracera returns to the Philippines for his father's funeral, he gets more than he bargained for. Although never very close to the wealthy sugar magnate, Jesus Caracera, Roger is chosen as the chief inheritor to the old patriarch's immense fortune, giving him a tidy sum of $500,000, perhaps in an effort for Roger to reestablish a connection with his birthplace.
Roger has had an uneasy relationship with his homeland. More American than Philippino, Roger has long since rejected much of his restrictive, conservative upbringing, preferring to adopt the freewheeling "western ways." Now living in New York City and teaching writing at Columbia University, his return to Manila is viewed with suspicion and a certain chagrin by his older and cynical uncles and aunts.
For the Caracera family has been hiding a dark secret: Apparently Roger's Uncle Eustacio Caracera was gay and had willed a sizeable sum to Pitik Sindit, a child whore; a young, poor prostitute with whom he had fallen in love with. Shamed by his brothers and sisters, Eustacio had sequestered himself from his own immediate family, undertaking a willed ostracism, a careful quiet mutiny.
Annoyed that his family tried to derail Pitik's rightful inheritance, and full of guilt over his family's feudal wealth, Roger decides to track him down as well to give him his rightful bequest. While his relatives begin to view him as the "unearther, the burrower, and the formenter of old and new troubles," Roger comes to believe that he wants to leave some kind of signature behind, his actions reflecting a bedrock of selflessness.
Roger's journey leads him into the midst of Manila's most horrible slums as he witnesses the city's barely underground gay sex trade. Pitik also goes by the name of Blueboy, and works as exotic dancer; employed by a vicious Philippino woman who also pimps him, he's constantly tempted by a self confessed American pedophile. Roger, who considers himself a confirmed heterosexual, tries to go out of his way to save Pitik from this squalid life, but he finds himself forming a strange connection to this boy, who is simultaneously seductive and naïve, bit also manipulative, and quite repellent.
Author, Han Ong weaves an exotic tale of family intrigue, set against the background of a country where the demarcation between the rich and poor, the haves and the have-nots have never been more finely drawn. Roger starts out with good intentions, determined to end the line of what he sees as a decrepit dynasty, but he is constantly confounded by the world around him.
His Aunt Irene warns him, trying to set him straight, in her world "there are the servers and those whom are served." She possesses a ruthless, clear-eyed logic that aims to cut through the "liberal pretensions and foggy romanticism" of her nephew. This is reflected in Ong's own view of the Philippines, a world of elite tennis clubs serving as pockets of peace, members and patrons shielded from the cries of so much teaming poverty, "a country where money has a tactile presence; its power put plainly was supernatural."
Ong is notably quite damning of his homeland, hardly sympathetic to his country's plight, which continually excused it's poverty, its lack of education, its deplorable standard of living, and it's history of willing subjugation first to conquerors Spanish, Japanese, and American, and more recently to a string of mad despots.
The Disinherited is a big, sweeping saga; with the characters speaking in paragraphs and thinking in essays, long diatribes, the style reflecting this, deliberately convoluted and elaborate. The prose is studied, exquisite, and beautiful, as Ong steadily weaves a web of the Philippines, showcasing its history, class warfare, politics and cultural clashes; there's no doubt that the book is epic in tone and in theme.
In Roger, Ong has created a subtle and complicated character, caught up in the changing tides of his culture he's a man whose values are undoubtedly anchored in the West, but he still feels the ineffable pull of his birthplace, the old world with all it's chaos, corruption, poverty, and organized mayhem. Mike Leonard January 06.
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