The Pretenders
By: F. Sionil Jose
Reading this book at first is really boring, especially for me, definitely not a book worm of novels. Reading the Choragus really gave me this craving to read it more. This novel has it’s practical side shown on the scenes of business, family, relationship with other people and also the political side. It’s a very typical Filipino story. The emotional side of it is the love story of the poor man (Antonio Samson) and the rich woman(Carmen Villa). The rich girl fell in love with a poor guy. You can see the transformation of the character formed also through the plot of the story. Tony being poor transformed his perception of things as the same level of the elites. He was formed to be that “tony character” at first he was thinking on why on earth that rich girl chose him. The next idea is that his comparison of the rich and poor. Himself being poor again through the characters and the plot the idea of him being a poor is reversed into him being rich, the impact of the characters and the plot make his character much more intensified. The pressure is on his personality.
Reading this book makes you think of topics out of nowhere, while reading it, some of the phrases really created a question in my mind. One that i really like is when Tony said that “Poverty is degrading”. This phrase already lost is value. Always used, but only in this novel that i thought of it differently. Poverty doesn’t always mean financial instability. Many times that you can experience it personally, we are human beings too normal to be judgmental. But i think all happening to us is really like a domino effect. We have poverty inside making us more judgmental, making us more human. Tony’s character is alive not only in the book but realistically it is existing. Other characters in the story unconsciously exists in our lives.