DuskPaperback, 28 April 1998

With "Dusk" (originally published in the Philippines as "Po-on"), F. Sionil Jose begins his five-novel 'Rosales Saga'. Set in the 1880s, "Dusk" records the exile of a tenant family from its village and the new life it attempts to make in the small town of Rosales. Here commences the epic tale of a family unwillingly thrown into the turmoil of history. But this is more than a historical novel; it is also the eternal story of man's tortured search for true faith and the larger meaning of existence. Jose carefully begins to paint a portrait of his country, showing the terrible physical and emotional hardships the people endure as the Philippines is transformed by the "liberation" from Spanish rule and by the oppression that continues, even as the Americans take over. Still, far from drawing a picture of hopelessness, Jose has achieved a fiction of extraordinary scope and passion, a book as meaningful to Philippine literature as "One Hundred Years of Solitude" is to Latin American literature.