Contemporary Literary Criticism | Hagedorn, Jessica - Michael Upchurch (review date 5 October 2003)

Michael Upchurch (review date 5 October 2003)

SOURCE: Upchurch, Michael. “What's Cooking on Mindanao?” New York Times Book Review (5 October 2003): 13.

[In the following review, Upchurch argues that Dream Jungle is Hagedorn's “best book since Dogeaters,” praising the author's skillful evocation of the Philippines in the 1970s.]

A narrative collage hopscotching from year to year, from place to place and from one point of view to another: that's what Jessica Hagedorn offers in her intricate new novel, which boldly links a Manila millionaire's “discovery” of a Stone Age tribe on Mindanao with a filmed re-creation of the Vietnam War on that same guerrilla-plagued island six years later.

Dream Jungle scrupulously documents its chosen time and place: the Marcos-controlled Philippines of the 1970's. But it also, more ambitiously, engages with the unreliability of the realities it depicts.

Could this...

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