Reviews for Dream Jungle

The average rating for Dream Jungle based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-08-01 00:00:00 James L Prellwitz I finished this a few days ago and still don't quite know what to make of it. The author took two notorious, true incidents in 1970s Filipino history and tied them together into a fictional book. First, she wrote a fictionalized account of the "discovery" of a "Stone Age" tribe in a remote part of the Phillipines in the early 1970s. In real life, this ended up being exposed as a hoax orchestrated by a Harvard-educated, rich Filipino who was tied to Phillipine President Ferdinand Marcos. Marcos used this "discovery" as a way to launder money and retain a sheen of humanitarianism while declaring martial law in his country. However, to this day some still believe that the tribe was legitimate. The author in "Dream Jungle" imagined a situation that would have led a highly educated, rich, and pampered man to imagine and orchestrate a hoax of this magnitude. She also left the resolution on whether it was indeed a hoax up to the reader to decide. The second incident was the filming of "Apocalypse Now" in the Phillipines in the mid 1970s in the same vicinity where this supposed "lost tribe" was found. The author changed the names of the actors and never identified the film, but it was quite clear what movie and which actors/ people she was writing about. The problem I had was that these two storylines never melded into any sort of enlightenment. I enjoyed reading both, and Hagedorn used a couple of characters to tie the two stories together (though the reporter seemed like an afterthought) in a somewhat logical way. However, the Stone Age tribe story and the story of the filming of the movie did not reflect each other or complement each other into some greater truth. If you're going to have two entirely separate storylines in one book, I expect that a moral or enlightenment about the human condition or about Filipino society or SOMETHING would come out of their melding that would make me understand why the author felt the need to write about these two disparate subjects in the same work of fiction. I'm still just a little mystified.

Review # 2 was written on 2010-04-07 00:00:00 K E Baxter I don't understand why every single Filipino/a out there isn't giving this book 5 stars. Whatever your predilections are as far as plot goes, this is a vivid and imaginative book, written by a delightful Filipina writer with a strong voice (Hagedorn). The book DEFINITELY has something to say about race, class, the clash of cultures, the views of outsiders juxtaposed with the views of insiders, and the complicated post-colonial world that is the Philippines. I for one LOVED the ending. I was worried that it was going to be a cheese-fest at the end (i.e. Rizalina would be "saved" by the white American actor and whisked away to America to spend her days living as his exotic trophy wife). Instead, Hagedorn gives us something more complicated, a bit more subtle and very very well done.