SOURCE: Grow, L. M. “The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor.” In The Novels of Bienvenido N. Santos, pp. 61-76. Quezon City, Philippines: Giraffe Books, 1999.

In the following essay, Grow regards The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor as one of Santos's most successful novels.

Santos once singled out [The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor] as his favorite among the novels he had written (in Grow, Interview).¹ Among the reasons Santos specified is that “It's a sad story, but I think it's very funny in parts” (in Grow, Interview). If so, it is funny only to the aficionado of whimsicality. The admirer of Dickens' eccentrics might see the novel in this light, but it seems to me much more likely to strike the reader as a very disquieting story—much more akin tonally to Kipling's “The Gardener” than to, say, Tom...