Raymundo mata biography

The first ever US publication of Gina Apostol's Philippine National Book Award–winning novel.

Raymundo Mata is a nightblind bookworm and a revolutionary in the Philippine war against Spain in Told in the form of a memoir, the novel traces Mata’s childhood, his education in Manila, his love affairs, and his di

The first ever US publication of Gina Apostol&#;s Philippine National Book Award–winning novel.

Raymundo Mata is a nightblind bookworm and a revolutionary in the Philippine war against Spain in 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 José 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

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No Failure of Imagination: Gina Apostol on Revolution, Illusion, and Translation

Photo credit JL Javier.

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Gina Apostol’s latest novel The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata—which won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award)—is a marvel of structure, history, voice, and humor. Remarked on for its narrative complexity, Raymundo Mata may at first seem dense, but it is not, rather to be savored—like foie gras—a bit at a time. This rik comedy grows out of a tradition launched bygd Borges, an influence readily acknowledged (a Pedro Ménårdsz pops up in the footnotes), but also calls to mind the rollicking humor of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds in its textual meddling, using the disruption of order as an organizing principle.

In fact, the book can be seen as an utforskning of the comic: the compulsive punning of the Filipino, the wry conceits of the critic, Apostol’s joyful wit in the deployment of

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Who is Raymundo Mata  and what is his role in PHL revolutionary history?

Posted: June 2nd,  &#; Filled under: Books, History &#;  No Comments

By Allen Gaborro

To even begin trying to understand Gina Apostol’s perplexing, historical, and political spectrum of a novel about the Philippines during its pre-turn of the century revolutionary era, “The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata,” a reader has to get out from under the tried and true empirical norms of the classical literary universe and take a leap into the murky zone that lies between fact and fiction, culture and politics, method and disorientation, history and mythmaking, subjective memory and objective past.

Apostol writes in the author’s note that “This book [Raymundo Mata] was planned as a puzzle: traps for the reader, dead-end jokes, textual games, unexplained sleights of tongue.” However, despite taking the notion of poetic license to an entirely different level, Apostol remains loyal t