Product Description

Jessica Hagedorn has received enormous critical acclaim for her edgy, high-energy novels chronicling the clash and embrace of American and Filipino cultures. With Dream Jungle, she breaks through to a new level of narrative daring and has written her most complex and accomplished novel to date.

Dream Jungle takes off from two seemingly unrelated events-the discovery of a lost Stone Age tribe in a remote mountainous area of the Philippines and the filming of an epic Vietnam War movie in the rain forest. But the "lost tribe" just might be a clever hoax masterminded by a brooding wealthy iconoclast-and the Hollywood movie seems doomed as the cast and crew continue to self-destruct in a cloud of drugs and egos.

At once a sensual and razor-sharp indictment of colonialism, Dream Jungle evokes the desperate beauty and rank corruption of the Philippines from the height of the Marcos era in the mid-1970s to the end of the twentieth century.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1046134 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-29
• Released on: 2003-09-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Barbed and alluring, this third novel by Hagedorn (Dogeaters; The Gangster of Love) revolves around the purported discovery of a Stone Age "lost tribe" in the Philippines, and deftly explores late 20th-century Filipino cultural identity. Led to the cave-dwelling Taobo by an enterprising local in 1971, mestizo politician Zamora Lopez de Legazpi is as contented as a "conquistador without an army" can be. At around the same time, 10-year-old Rizalina, the sole survivor of a shipwreck in which her brutal father and twin brothers were killed, comes to live with her mother, who serves as loyal cook to Zamora at his grandiose Manila palace. A model student with an inquisitive mind, Lina is briefly happy, but when she is nearly 12 and Zamora takes an unseemly interest in her, she flees and ends up prostituting herself. A few years later, Vincent Moody appears, a captivating but aptly named film celebrity who abandons his girlfriend and son in California to star in a big Vietnam-era blockbuster, Napalm Sunset (think Apocalypse Now). When he stumbles upon Lina at a joint called the Love Connection, he falls for her, and makes her part of the film's entourage. Meanwhile, Paz Marlowe, a Filipino-American journalist with social ties to Zamora's family, returns to Manila to attend her mother's funeral and to unravel the inconsistencies in accounts of Zamora's discovery. With the addition of each narrative thread, Hagedorn deconstructs Zamora's story, revealing the corruption of a regime capable of orchestrating the discovery of a new tribe as part of a public relations coup. Hagedorn hits some notes too hard, but her storytelling is sensuous and vivid and her characters are cunningly imagined; she offers a telling glimpse of the imposing American presence, both physical and cultural, in the Philippines.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Hagedorn continues her brilliant and mordant inquiry into the tricky relationship between the Philippines and the U.S. in her mesmerizing third novel, her best yet. In a wonderful bit of synchronicity, she fictionalizes the same infamous chapter in modern Filipino history chronicled by Robin Hemley in Inventing Eden [BKL My 1 03], the alleged 1970s discovery of a lost Stone Age tribe by a wealthy, well-connected, and untrustworthy playboy. Hagedorn portrays her self-serving and unreliable champion of indigenous peoples, Zamora Lopez de Legazpi, through the skeptical eyes of several intriguing characters, especially those of Lina, the beautiful young daughter of Zamora's long-suffering cook, whose life intersects with Paz Marlowe's, a journalist of mixed heritage, when they both end up on the jungle set of a risky Hollywood movie, Napalm Sunset, a shrewd take-off on Apocalypse Now. Without once letting up on this electrifying tale's subversive suspense, rich sensuality, emotional precision, and searing satirical humor, Hagedorn performs great feats of social critique by asking what is primitive and what is civilized, tracking the fallout from the Spanish and American occupations of this island nation and illuminating the link between storytelling, image, and power. Whoever controls the discourse and the cameras, rules. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
A richly intriguing study of flamboyant ambition and the politics of corruption. -- Seattle Times

As beautiful as summer, as unforgettable as heartbreak . . . [A] luminous performance. -- Junot Diaz, author of Drawn

Customer Reviews

mysterious, disturbing, alluring
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.

Just too disjointed and lacking narrative flow.
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.

A Wild Ride
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!