The mystery of the Philippines, the nation created in the image of the desire of others

With its cover full of tropical mystery and its classic title, The revolution according to Raymundo Mata by Gina Apostol (Utopia, 416 pp., 19 euros) contains the promise of an edifying immersion in the history of a nation, the Philippines, "created in the image of the desire of others" and of which we often know culpably little. The prose appears immediately fulminant, fully restored by the translation of Alessandro Raveggi, and the observations on history, politics and the myth so intelligent that we go back on the page, wish we had a pencil, look for a notebook to take notes on. Three scholars, a psychoanalyst, a translator and an academician, not all sane, vie for the interpretation of the bizarre manuscript, found in a tin biscuit box, by a certain Raymundo Mata, a young revolutionary grappling with the riots of liberation from Spanish domination, at the end of the 19th century. "Ours is a story that invites neurotics to come forward and express their opinion on the matter," writes Apostol, who puts his literary intuition into action in a 400-page novel in which the plot is deliberately paralyzed by an imposing paratext of prefaces and notes that report the bickering, often hilarious, between the three interpreters of Mata's story, ready to analyze and give absolute value to even the smallest details, to the most scurrilous. "Normally the memoirs of a revolutionary emerge when the hero is above all suspicion, i.e. when the dream he represents is now dead and buried" and here it is precisely the epic of the national hero that is put under the lens of 'irreverence, in a discourse that on the one hand has a universal scope and on the other is very much focused on the reality of the history of the Philippines, a country whose national identity, full of very real demons, however has at its center a work of fiction, Noli me tangere, by José Rizal, “Source of Wisdom, Holy Grail, Our most prolific Martyr, Origin of Our History and of Words”, whose statue is present in every square and whose sentences are memorized by schoolchildren , but which is written in a language, Spanish, that no one reads anymore and which also for this reason contains unstable truths like a small boat in a lagoon of the archipelago-country.

And in fact Apostol, born in Manila in 1963, writes in English and lives in the United States, where she is appreciated as a "magician of language", a definition that is enough to read a page to attribute them with conviction, while our thoughts turn to Roberto Bolaño, to Foster Wallace of Infinite Jest and to the most evident matrix, Pale Fire by Nabokov. "An impressive babel of the Filipino soul has marinated Mata's manuscript using a sauce of adobo, pancit and lugao", and we readers delve into this marinade, first with amusement, then with admiration and finally with points of inevitable exasperation with a narrative machine that often leaves us, and one suspects deliberately, excluded. As if Gina Apostol wanted us to perceive intellectually the frustration, also made up of irony and the deep passion that is needed to argue, of a national history in which the only thing that is understandable is that authoritarian regimes thrive in ever more violent forms, from the Spanish domination which lasted from 1521 to 1898, up to the conjugal dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos in which the writer grew up and to the current one, a symptom of the same neurosis: "The country in question has a history of self-hatred that may not be totally unfounded."