Customer Reviews

My Brother, My Executioner

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Sionsil Jose is seen as one of the Philippine's greatest novelists. This is what attracted me to his well-known Rosales Novels. This is a series of five novels about the life of a small Illocano town in Central Luzon (Rosalles) after which the Novels are named. I am amazed at the English of Sionil Jose- it is perfect English, and even pleasantly poetic at times.

The story is not the most interesting story, but the book is laden with Filipino culture. The author writes in a way that shows the motives, thoughts and emotions of the Filipino while the outsider only sees the external. As a foreigner living in the Philippines, I appreciated being able to `crawl' into the head of the Filipino characters and see how these characters think and act. Their motives and thoughts are probably not incredibly different than many of the people that I come across every day.

Differences in cultures, such as the difference between American culture and Filipino culture, are so much deeper than different foods or different styles of clothing. Cultures run much deeper than what you can see, and I believe that these books illustrate effectively those `deeper' differences between the thinking of a Westerner and the thinking of a Filipino. I loved the book, and look forward to reading the others in the series.