The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Filipino writer Apostol (Insurrecto) revises her playful 2009 novel, winner of the Philippine National Book Award and appearing in English for the first time, to highly entertaining effect. Framed as the expansive, postmodern memoir of visually impaired ophthalmologistRaymundo Mata, the book combines Mata's reminiscences of the 1890s revolution against Spanish colonial forces and his involvement with the secret revolutionary Katipunan society with references to revered real-life 19th-century nationalist Filipino writer Jose Rizal. In a note commenting on the new edition, Apostol describes the book's eccentric intricacies by noting how it was "planned as a puzzle: traps for the reader, dead end jokes, textual games, unexplained sleights of tongue." The narrative is studded with hilarious argumentative footnotes between an editor, a translator, and a scholar of Mata's work, producing dueling Nabokovian narratives: Mata's diaries and the conflicting commentaries, all suffused perfectly with Apostol's dense, demanding style. As the story of the revolution faces off with literary histrionics, all is resolved with a gut-punch conclusion. Apostol's unique perspective on facts versus fiction would make for a perfect Charlie Kaufman movie.
