''Three Filipino Women: Novellas'' is a book authored by award-winning Filipino literary writer, F. Sionil José. The book is a compilation of three

novella A novella is a narrative prose fiction whose length is shorter than most novels, but longer than most novelettes and short stories. The English word ''novella'' derives from the Italian meaning a short story related to true (or apparently so) ...

s, each narrating a segment in the life and experiences of three women in the Philippines, providing the reader a journey to the "mentality and geography of the Philippines" and to the use of English as a language that the characters are "trying to make their own", reflective of how a Filipino speak in

Philippine English Philippine English is a variety of English native to the Philippines, including those used by the media and the vast majority of educated Filipinos and English learners in the Philippines from adjacent Asian countries. English is taught ...

, characterized by being "heavy on the reflexive" (similar to the speaking style used by

Ferdinand Marcos Ferdinand Emmanuel Edralin Marcos Sr. (September 11, 1917 – September 28, 1989) was a Filipino lawyer, politician, dictator, and Kleptocracy, kleptocrat who served as the tenth president of the Philippines from 1965 to 1986. He ruled the c ...

) and with its own form of "phrasing" and "edge of formality".

Description

One of the male narrators in the novellas was an educated man trying to "come to terms with post-colonial corruption, sexuality and women" tells the stories about three Filipino women who lived in three periods in Philippine history: one who lived during the late 1960s, another who lived in the 1970s, and the other lived in the early 1980s, all of whom experienced the politics and "their passions" during their own respective eras. The three novellas in the collection include ''Obsession'', ''Platinum'', and ''Cadena de Amor'' (literally "Chain of Love"). Three female characters were portrayed in each novella: one of a prostitute named Ermi (the "expensive call-girl") in ''Obsession'', the other of a student political activist named Malu in ''Platinum'', and another is of a politician named Narita in ''Cadena de Amor''. All the men acting as story-tellers in the novellas each hoped to have "a transcendent experience with the woman who fascinates him--but cannot escape the sense of his own corruption". The three novellas explored the "character of a Filipina, and by extension" of the Filipinos, their society and their nation.

Publication history

The current compilation titled ''Three Filipino Women'' was published by

Random House Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the foll ...

in the United States in 1992. Prior to that, two of the novellas were published by The Cellar Bookshop in the Philippines on December 28, 1981 as a 104-page book under the title ''Two Filipino Women'' (., One of the novellas, whose protagonist is named Ermi, a prostitute, was included as a chapter in a full-length 1988 novel titled '' Ermita: A Filipino Novel''.

References

1981 novels 1988 novels 1992 novels Novels by F. Sionil José Historical novels Philippine English-language novels Novels set in the Philippines Novels set in the 1960s Novels set in the 1970s Novels set in the 1980s 1980s novellas {{1990s-hist-novel-stub