Reading and Re-Remembering in Gina Apostol's Bibliolepsy
2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 15; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2022.0093
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Irish and British Studies
ResumoReading and Re-Remembering in Gina Apostol's Bibliolepsy R. Zamora Linmark Bibliolepsy, by Gina Apostol (Soho Press, 2022) 216 pp. First published by the University of the Philippines Press in 1997 Reading Remembrances of a Manila Past I first read Gina Apostol's Bibliolepsy in 1998, a year after it was published by the University of the Philippines Press. I was residing in Manila at the time; one of 10 U.S. scholars and artists granted a year-long fellowship to experience the thriving and bustling metropolitan city that keeps expanding to include neighboring provincial towns. I was there primarily to research my second novel that, mirroring the political and economic state of the country, was in perpetual crisis. But the locals didn't seem to mind the political circus and economic instability, for they were partying like it was 1999. They had just unanimously elected a president, Joseph Estrada, who first gained national prominence by saving lives in the movies before shooting his mouth off in politics, which seems to be the trajectory for opportunists and oligarchs. Two years after holding office, the action-hero-turned-mayor-turned-senator-turned-championof-the-poor-president would be ousted through another People Power revolution, the second in 14 years. Rolling the Revolution Revolutions are like rolling power and water outages in the country—they occur more often than Jesus appearing through the hole of a magic doughnut or Mary speaking in French to young boys aspiring to be beauticians. The first People Power is the setting for the second part of Bibliolepsy. It takes place in Manila in 1986, when the Marcos dynasty, after nearly two decades of plundering and exploiting the nations' resources, reached a climactic end, with the ailing despot being wheeled into a U.S. military plane bound for Honolulu via Guam. [End Page 188] Buy the Book by the Cover I was sold on the cover of Bibliolepsy alone: a girl in braided pigtails sitting on the floor with an opened book the size of a photo album before her. She has her palms pressed hard onto the floor covered by rumpled sheets, as if she has just pulled herself up from the world of her reading to look up at the camera. One can deduce that the wide-eyed girl is Primi, the bibliophile protagonist in Apostol's debut novel whose world revolves around books. Sex, Books, Revolution A memory that stuck to me about the novel was its frank treatment of sex. In fact, the novel opens with the narrator Primi's definition of "bibliolepsy" as a "mawkishness derived from habitual aloneness and congenital desire" that manifests in "a quickening between the thighs and in the points of the breast, a broad aching V, when addressed by writers, books, bibliographies, dictionaries, xerox machines. …" Prior to Bibliolepsy, the only books from the Philippines that candidly dealt with sex were the groundbreaking anthologies Forbidden Fruit: Erotic Writings: Women Write the Erotic (Anvil, 1992), edited by Tina Cayugan, and Ladlad: Philippine Gay Writings (Anvil, 1994), edited by Danton Remoto and J. Neil Garcia. To my knowledge, Bibliolepsy is the first single-authored novel by a Filipina that unabashedly talks about sex (because sex is best when it's unabashed!) and connects it to reading. Most importantly, it's told from the perspective of a Filipina. So, memories of sex, books, and, oh, yeah, the EDSA Revolution, also known as "People Power" (because, like our first names, we Filipinos can't just settle for a single appellation to christen our revolutions; we have to have nicknames for them as well). I was also intrigued by the novel's formatting. It reminded me of the novels of one of my favorite Brazilian writers and early influences, Machado de Assis. An autodidact and grandson of freed slaves, De Assis predated postmodernism by a century. His novels were experimental, wickedly funny, witty, smart, and über critical of his country, like Apostol and her novels. [End Page 189] Bibliolepsy, for example, is formatted like de Assis's Epitaph of a Small Winner. Both are divided into small sections with catchy titles. My 1999 memories of Bibliolepsy end here. Twenty-Three Years Later...
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