Revealing glimpses of the Philippine Revolution and the Filipino
writer Jose Rizal emerge despite the worst efforts of feuding academics
in Apostol's hilariously erudite novel, which won the Philippine
National Book Award.
Gina Apostol's riotous second novel takes the form of a memoir by one
Raymundo Mata, a half-blind bookworm and revolutionary, tracing his
childhood, his education in Manila, his love affairs, and his discovery
of writer and fellow revolutionary, Jose Rizal. Mata's 19th-century
story is complicated by present-day foreword(s), afterword(s), and
footnotes from three fiercely quarrelsome and comic voices: a
nationalist editor, a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst critic, and a
translator, Mimi C. Magsalin.
In telling the contested and fragmentary story of Mata, Apostol finds
new ways to depict the violence of the Spanish colonial era, and to
reimagine the nation's great writer, Jose Rizal, who was executed by the
Spanish for his revolutionary activities, and is considered by many to
be the father of Philippine independence. *
*
The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata offers an intoxicating blend
of fact and fiction, uncovering lost histories while building dazzling,
anarchic modes of narrative.
