Customer Reviews

Don Vicente: Two Novels (Modern Library Paperbacks)

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I have always regarded F. Sionil Jose as one of the best Filipino authors. Don Vicente, as most of of Jose's books, is sharp-eyed in its observation of the class struggle still prevalent in Philippine society. While the novel is set in the 1950s, the ideological conflict between half-brothers Luis and Victor, presented in the second part of the novel, is still very much real today. Luis' struggle portrays how material comfort can make man turn his back on his personal ideals.

Two books in one. The first story of a boy growing up in a small town as the son of the controller for the local landowner. Through a series of encounters, the reader follows the growing distance of the boy from his father, whom he first loves, then respects and then hates. The second story is about Luis, the illegtimate son of Don Vicente, the rich landowner, and his half-brother Victor, who becomes a rebel commander. After being educated in Manila, Luis becomes a journalist with liberal to leftist tendencies. When his father dies, he inherits the land and becomes just the patriarchan landowner that his father was before. Because of this, he comes into conflict with his half-brother, and the end of the book is the final encounter of the two brothers.
On the surface, both books seem to show father-son conflicts, but it is not just generation this book is about. It is about a history of injustice and the urgent need for land reform. Anyway, Jose shows that there will never be a land reform a nd just society as long as the owners of the land have a say in it.

I enjoyed both novels very much. I thought the first, The Tree, to be the best. It made its point in a more subtle way. The images of rural life in the Philippines were well drawn. Both novels illustrate how privilege in a society with gross economic disparity can corrupt. The elite as well as the masses suffer. This is a central theme in the recent novel Ilustrado by Miquel Syjuco . I wonder if Crispin in Illustrado was in part inspired by Jose.