The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

translation, with notes.
     But even then.
     I was not persuaded.
     In my experience, the voice of the revolutionist is clouded by conflicting purposes.
     He is vulnerable to the cynicism of a world that by the time he is done has sadly changed.
     Our revolution failed.
     Let s face it.
     We drove off a Spanish empire that had already given up the ghost then the Americans beat us to a pulp.
     They had guns.
     We wore slippers.
     Who are we kidding?
     Everyone acknowledges we got it worse than Vietnam, and the Battle of Manila Bay was way back in 1898.
     We lost big time.
     Why else do we have postcolonial conferences except to invite everyone to pick at our scabs?
     Typically the revolutionist s memoir emerges when the hero is beyond innocence when the dream is dead. The gap between the irreducible (the mad flipflop fever, the trauma that cannot be spoken) and the speech that cradles it (unnaturally chronological, with suspicious clarity, and keloids of rancor garnished by footnotes) is only natural.
     After all, as the blonde scholar said, and I quote with disgust: the gap between language and reality is the bane of the human condition.
     Unquote.
     However, in the histories of our revolution, this is magnified by the speaker s own acceptance of his Fall. We re left with the pathos of which he cannot speak, a rotten trick, if you ask me.
     This is the

Jacques Lacan. But it is also funny and witty as it picks lice, nits, and all on the hoaxes in our history. It affirms, if it still needs to be affirmed, the power of fiction to shape and reshape the gaps in the narratives of our history as a nation. The main character here is History, and its protagonist, Imagination. For this audacious sword-play of a novel, the National Book Award is given to Gina Apostol s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata.
Judges' Citation, Philippine National Book Award

Apostol s novel requires us to sit up, lean in, and study. It demands our active participation. In the end, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata is intended for a Filipino audience first with inside jokes, play on words, and regional references and American audiences second. And that s a definitive reason to pick it up. Apostol holds a mirror to American exceptionalism and forces us to look.
Ploughshares

Filipina-American novelist Gina Apostol explores the father of Filipino literature and the movement for independence which he embodied in her darkly comic new novel . . . With shades of Roberto Bolaño and Vladimir Nabokov, she writes that her novel was planned as a puzzle: traps for the reader, dead end jokes, textual games, unexplained sleights of the tongue.
The Millions

Inventive . . . Excavating the history of the oppressive Spanish colonial era in a meta narrative laden with diary entries, wordplay and puzzles complete with footnotes from an imaginary editor.
Everything Zoomer

The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata is certainly a wild ride, playful without let-up but often to serious purpose.
The Complete Review 

Beyond the questions of national identity the novel raises, Mata is simply funny richly satirical of psychology and history, and of the PoMo gestures that it embraces.
On the Seawall 

Highly entertaining . . . The narrative is studded with hilarious argumentative footnotes between an editor, a translator, and a scholar of Mata s work, producing dueling Nabokovian narratives . . . Apostol s unique perspective on facts versus fiction would make for a perfect Charlie Kaufman movie.
Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Edward Said wrote that the role of the intellectual is to present alternative narratives on history than those provided by the combatants who claim entitlement to official memory and national identity who propagate heroic anthems sung in order to sweep all before them.  In this fearlessly intellectual novel, Gina Apostol takes on the keepers of official memory and creates a new, atonal anthem that defies single ownership and, in fact, can only be performed by the many by multiple voices in multiple readings. We may never look at ourselves and our history the same way again.
Eric Gamalinda, author of My Sad Republic