The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata
(Sprache: Englisch)
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...
Gina Apostol s riotous...
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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.
Lese-Probe zu „The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata “
Editor s Preface I had not read General Mata s journals when I spoke last year to a Mu rkian psychoanalyst about the possibility of hysterical abreactions occurring on a national scale. This was during a lull at a conference at a floating restaurant on Manila Bay (or was it a fish market in Kowloon? I can t keep those junkets straight). There was a full moon, and we could see the marble columns of a colonial building nearby a monstrous wreck that gave the shantytown around it a nasty glamor. The scholar was an unshaved blonde, the kind one often meets at academic conferences. She was expounding on independence movements as macroscopic examples of aggressivity in the analysand while she fondled some frangipani and picked through the pectorals of a Peking duck.
It struck me as she manhandled vertebrae and munched on the fronds, or vice versa, that academic blondes are aggressive bores.
To compare our revolution the crux of our history to some hysterical patient on a hypothetical couch was just icing on her slanderous cake.
But what did I have to offer her as evidence of the irreducible reality of our history? I knew no scholar, no text, not even a comic book that spoke of the Philippine War of Independence without disturbing solipsism or deeply divided angst. It s a history that invites neurotics to speak up. It s no great surprise that it ends up a vulgar patient in obscure neo-Freudian journals.
When the publisher Trina Trono described to me the Raymundo Mata manuscript an excessive term, perhaps, for the mess she held up in her hands I have to say I was skeptical. She held up an assortment of unpaginated notes and mismatched sheaves packed in a ratty biscuit tin and stuffed in a tattered medical bag, the edges of the papers curled up in permanent rust.
Then she thrust into my hands another stack, a neatly typed
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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
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
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Autoren-Porträt von Gina Apostol
Gina Apostol is the PEN Open Book Award winning author of Gun Dealers' Daughter, as well as a two-time winner of the National Book Award in the Philippines for her novels Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. Her short stories have appeared in various anthologies and journals including The Gettysburg Review and the Penguin anthology of Asian American fiction, Charlie Chan Is Dead, Volume 2.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Gina Apostol
- 2021, Internationale Ausgabe, 360 Seiten, Maße: 14,2 x 21,1 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Soho Press
- ISBN-10: 1641292776
- ISBN-13: 9781641292771
- Erscheinungsdatum: 21.01.2021
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Praise for The Revolution According to Raymundo MataWinner of 2010 Philippine National Book Award
Winner of 2010 Gintong Aklat (Golden Book) Award
A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of 2021
The Millions Most Anticipated Fiction of 2021
Gina Apostol s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata weaves the complex tangle of Philippine history, literature, and languages (along with contemporary academic scholarship) into a brilliant tour de force of a novel. Brava!
John Barth
Virgil should offer libations to the gods in thanksgiving that Gina Apostol writes about the Philippines founding stories instead of Rome s. Her latest novel to appear in the United States, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata, wreaks playful and learned havoc on the life and work of the 19th-century writer Jose Rizal . . . [Apostol] writes historical fiction like Hilary Mantel on acid.
Randy Boyagoda, The New York Times Book Review
Make no mistake, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata by Gina Apostol is a classic, a novel that is brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed.
Peter Bacho, International Examiner
[A] genre-bending historical novel that blurs the line between fact and fiction, presented as the memoir of Raymundo Mata, a 19th-century revolutionary who crosses paths with famed Filipino writer and national hero José Rizal, complete with feuding annotations from a nationalist editor, a psychoanalyst, and a translator.
BuzzFeed
A masterful work of historical fiction set in the country on the cusp of a revolt that would end nearly four centuries of Spanish colonial rule.
The Nation
Gina Apostol tells our revolutionary history or fragments of our history using a pastiche of writing from the academe, a diary, stories within stories, jokes, puns, allusions, a virtual firecracker of words. Her novel is fearlessly intellectual, anchored firmly on the theories of
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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
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
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