Customer Reviews

Dream Jungle

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Such a mysterious, alluring & disturbing book! What is good: the writing. The language. The sense of place. You can feel the heat. Be utterly squashed by the poverty. Be intrigued by the characters. It's even okay that you don't know if the tribe is a hoax or not.

What is annoying: the many characters, and many POVs, so many that it's hard to keep track of them all. It is also annoying that sometimes a section on a certain character is in first person, and sometimes third.

Well worth reading.

In this novel set in the Philippines in the 1970s we first meet Zamora, a wealthy Spanish landowner, as he helicopters to a remote area and discovers a small band of people who are still living the stone age. His study of this group of people seem to be his hobby and his passion.

We also meet a young girl who is a servant in his home as well as his troubled German wife who soon grows weary of her unhappy life. There's some political intrigue and some interesting characters and the story had a good chance of holding my interest. Alas, though, the author left too many connecting details out to give it a coherent narrative flow and although I continued reading, the plot never quite hung together. When I finished the book I still wasn't sure what it was about although it raised the questions that perhaps there wasn't a stone age tribe at all, but just a plot on the part of the corrupt government to give Zamora access to areas which would be politically advantageous to the dictator. If this doesn't make sense to you, it doesn't make sense to me either.

Add to this a Hollywood film crew that has come into the town to make a movie about the Vietnam War. This section of the book was probably based on the filming of "Apocalypse Now" This part seemed to flow along well until it, too, lapsed into postmodernism and left more unanswered questions.

There were some parts of the book that were extremely well done. One was the voice of the servant girl character. However, this one character was not enough to save this book from being hard to follow. On the whole, in spite of some good descriptions of the locale, Dream Jungle was too disjointed for me to recommend.

What a ride. In short, it was a rush to read Dream Jungle. The characters are fascinating and the environment and situations these people are in this story are as equally compelling. I can't even begin to describe the book because the characters and plot lines are so layered and complex. It is woven tightly though and in the end, everything makes perfect sense. Jessica Hagedorn is one of the premiere Filipina American writers around--thank you for consistently producing outstanding work!

Jessica Hagedorn's Dream Jungle is a novel written with close detail to language. She uses multiple language, dialects and styles depending on the character's POV. In the midst of the beautiful language is a character with a penchant for saying "nevertheless," which changes in gravity as she ages. Sometimes the writing is absolutely beautiful and at other times it seems limp and lifeless. The tangle of plots and subplots surrounding a myriad of characters indeed makes each scene a dream within a small clearing in the jungle of the Philippines, the world, life.

Overall, I find it fascinating the novel is a combined narrative of two separate events, both inspired by true events: the discovery of a primitive tribe in the rain forest, later to be denounced as a hoax, and the setting of an American war movie in the midst of an actual war zone. I would love to give it more stars but for all the interesting characters and situations presented, it fails to fulfill.

I read this for grad school with a mentee group. Everyone else had a really hard time getting through the beginning. We all got sucked up at the same point and then the second half, we lost interest. Scenes seemed to be missing, some things were really uncharacteristic and overall the tone seemed to belong to a different novel.

I read everything with words on it, this book was hard to read, lacked any kind of flow , and had no real plot. I was just so disappointed. Amateurs will feel accomplished if they read this because they will think it was a hard read and they got through it, avid readers will know it was just a bad book.

This is the 3rd book I've read by Jessica Hagedorn. Her writing is amazing!

The characters in Dream Jungle are well developed... The subject matter and themes discussed are also well written and developed and edgy. Dream Jungle is a fun, fast, gritty page turner! Once you begin reading this novel it is difficult to put down as you want to find out what happens next.

Loved this book. One of my new favorites. Beautiful language. Well connected and intertwined stories. Loved it!!