The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata
Soho Press 2021; Anvil Publishing 2012
From John Barth, author of The Sot-Weed Factor:
Gina Apostol’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata weaves the complex tangle of Philppine history, literature, and languages (along with contemporary academic scholarship) into a brilliant tour de force of a novel. Brava!
From The New York Times
“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 José Rizal. ...She writes historical fiction like Hilary Mantel on acid. The result is demanding, confusing, exhausting and impressive, and justified…”
From The Nation
“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…History comes alive in the footnotes.”
From the Judges' Citation, Philippine National Book Award:
"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."