Dogeaters Book Review

Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


Where to begin? First and foremost, this book was crap. That's about the nicest way to put it. I haven't read a book this bad in a long time, and it only got worse the further I got into it. While I was reading it I was literally thinking that at first this would 3 stars, then halfway through I thought 2 stars, and now at the end it's definitely a 1 star book.

Before I write about why I didn't like it, I'll write a little bit about the plot. This is a story that takes place in the Philippines (the author is Filipino) and deals with a large cast of characters from all different walks of life whose paths come in contact with each other. The author mixes in actual history and excerpts from historical documents with fictional characters - some of whom are based on real life people, like Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos for example.

This is a postmodernist work where everything - plot, characters, themes, writing style, etc. - gets thrown in a blender and presented as is, for better or worse. This brings me to one of the reasons I didn't like it: there's basically no point to this story, it has the depth of a 10 AM soap opera. The book is such a mishmash of ideas that it simply ceases to have any discernable direction. There's a very large cast of characters and unless you read this book straight through, you're going to forget who is who. To make matters worse, the story is told in the first person by a number of different characters and that character changes every couple chapters; so basically you have no idea who is speaking for the first page of each chapter. This also brings up another problem: the writing is not very good, in my opinion it's actually quite poor, and all of the characters thoughts sound the same- whether they are male or female. Everyone sounds far too similar and this makes it ten times harder to figure out who is speaking and what's going on.

I could go on and on about the things I didn't like about this book but I think you get the idea. I do want to mention one more thing though: I was quite surprised how many good reviews this book has gotten on Goodreads and Amazon. I just don't get how anyone could like this book, it's a complete mess. I've read other postmodern authors, Murakami Haruki is one of my favorites and he would definitely be classified as a postmodern author, so I don't think I have a natural aversion towards postmodern literature (though I'm starting to develop one after reading this!). Perhaps if you're one of those people who can discern the meaning of life from random splashes of paint then you might like this book, otherwise I'd recommend staying away. Don't waste your time on this one.



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