[jaccarmac]

It's interesting that The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata is not mentioned in Apostol's byline here. As a short piece, this essay focuses on the surface of the history and its immediate implications, but the novel investigates many of the themes more deeply. It's particularly obsessed with the relationship between colonization and translation in the Phillipines, is consistently funny, and teaches the reader how to read it (the book's quite twisty in presentation, in a postmodern lit-crit style). I bounced off Insurrecto a few years ago without loving it (though in revisiting my own journals I learned that I apparently quite loved the first fifty pages), and the more recent (at least in the United States) novel has broken my brain or something because I'm entranced.