The Revolution According To Raymundo Mata

The Revolution According To Raymundo Mata
Gina Apostol
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NZ$ 30.00
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Paperback
h209 x 139mm
19 Jan 2021 US
International import eta 7-19 days
9781641292771
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Raymundo Mata is a nightblind bookworm and a revolutionary in the Philippine war against Spain in 1896. Told in the form of a memoir, the novel traces Mata' s childhood, his education in Manila, his love affairs, and his discovery of the books of the man who becomes the nation' s great hero Jose Rizal (Rizal, in real life, is executed by the Spaniards for writing two great novels that spark revolution-the Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo. At the time Rizal died, he was working on a third novel, Makamisa). Raymundo Mata' s autobiography, however, is de-centered by another story- that of the development of the book. In the foreword(s), afterword(s), and footnotes, we see the translator Mimi C. Magsalin (a pseudonym), the rabid nationalist editor Estrella Espejo, and the neo-Freudian psychoanalyst critic Dr. Diwata Drake make multiple readings of the Mata manuscript. Inevitably, clashes between these readings occur throughout the novel, and in the end the reader is on a wild chase to answer enduring questions- Does the manuscript contain Makamisa or is it Makamisa? Are the journals an elaborate hoax? And who is the perpetrator of the textual crime? In this story about the love of books, the story of a nation emerges. But what is a nation? What The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata imagines is that through acts of reading, a nation is born.
Praise for The Revolution According to Raymundo MataWinner of 2010 Philippine National Book Award Winner of 2010 Gintong Aklat (Golden Book) Award"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 "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 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 "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
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.
Status: Active
ISBN-13: 9781641292771
Published: 19 Jan 2021
Published In: United States
Imprint: Soho Press
Publisher: Soho Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 209mm
Width: 139mm
Pages: 1

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