Book Of Hatred And Compassion

I finished reading House Of Sand And Fog last week. I’ll have to say that this is one of the heaviest, darkest and most emotionally draining book I have read. Like being visited by a Dementor, I closed the book with the feeling that all the happy emotions has been sucked out of me.

As I said in my previous blog, this is basically a catastrophic intersection of three different lives. In its core is a searing portrayal of the American dream turned into a nightmare. We witness tragedy relentlessly escalate into another tragedy, like an ugly picture given an even uglier lighting.

Colonel Behrani is a greedy Iranian immigrant who just wants to rebuild his family’s lost glory. Kathy is a troubled woman who is trying to withstand her increasingly hopeless life. Sheriff Burdon is a man lost in his own domestic dilemma and looks for the answers in Kathy’s parallel struggle. Basically, three wrongs that will never make a right.

Very unlike Anita Shreve novels where the characters are lifted in the end; here we were not given that absolution. We watch the three leads crawl into the hole they dug for themselves and all we can do is gasp in horror and mourn their fates. In their forsaken tangle of conflicts, the characters did nothing but destroy themselves. What’s even more disheartening is the fact that everything started with a simple mistake that was allowed to snowball. Why, oh why.

Like an exquisite soap opera, we are ping-ponged between the characters so much so that we cannot decipher the heroes from the villains. We care for and hate them at the same time. We want to understand them in such perplexing circumstances. But we really can’t.

Andre Dubus III is a brilliant writer with a wicked sympathy and in-depth understanding of society and the clash of culture. His narrative is simplistic and vivid yet at the same time powerful and tender. His greatest talent is telling two sides of the story with consummate sincerity and conviction. He successfully marries compassion and hatred and the result is confounding, to say the least. I just don’t understand his unfair references to Filipinos (but I am half-biased here).

House of Sand And Fog is memorable in a dark, lingering way; a Greek tragedy retold in contemporary setting. It shows us how we can be trapped in our own circumstances. It examines the choices that make up a life's direction. This book is also relevant in the way it depicts culture and society and the terrible truths that shapes our very existence.

This book has been turned to a movie but I’m not interested in watching it. The book is already hauntingly depressing; so seeing it all over again on the big screen is already masochistic torture.