Book Review: BIBLIOLEPSY by Gina Apostol

Bibliolepsy by Gina Apostol
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

"You don’t need fairy tales—just come right up to EDSA."

What does a bookworm do when a workday frees up unexpectedly? (Ironically, courtesy of the son of the dictator whose reign was toppled on this day, 37 years ago)

Read a book that culminates in the People Power Revolution, naturally.

Of course, this is a Gina Apostol book, she who seems to have written exclusively for critics and PhD's, torturing the rest of us mortals by forcing us to check our dictionaries every other sentence. I did not have high hopes going into it, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it was more palatable than her later works (perhaps because this was a first novel, and the writer's hubris, though present, hadn't fully erupted yet).

One of the first things therapists tell their patients is to write about their experiences. Somehow, putting pen to paper helps us make sense of events that seem no have no meaning.

This is why we read books about our country's past. It's a way of placing one's self in the current of time, trying to understand what came before we were born, so we can catch a glimpse of where our country is going, and figure out what small role we can play in it.

And this was my hope when I picked up this book.

"Hearsay and desire are all I have. Apart from these, we have no other weapons, except to keep trying to remember as much as we can. With love."

Two sisters are born to nationalist parents who mysteriously disappear, leaving them orphaned yet privileged. So privileged that they need not worry about earning enough to put food on the table. So privileged that the younger sister spends her university years in UP Diliman reading, going to poetry readings and artist's parties, sleeping with as many men as she can seduce, and generally living in books far removed from the winds of history coursing through the country... until a tryst in UP's Sunken Garden is rudely interrupted by those marching from Ilang-Ilang Dorm to EDSA, and she decides to come along because it might be fodder for a future book someday.

I guess by now, you can tell how much I disliked the protagonist. LOL. There was no saving grace about her. Neither kind nor humble, cynically judging all she came across, I just wanted to shake her and shout that for all her reading, she missed the crucial point of it all: to understand our world better, so we might try to make our country better.

I worry that foreigners not knowing more of the Philippines would get the wrong impression of the hardships we endured under Martial Law, if they thought this was an accurate representation of student life in 1986 Manila.

The book had rage aplenty, but at the wrong things. Apostol does not even bother trying to hide her disdain for her country and countrymen, it's as if she merely uses us as fuel for a book obviously written aiming for prizes, peppered with words and scenes meant to shock and intimidate the reader. Behold the glorious authoress with the light of literary genius shining from her brow, name-dropping and quote referencing so many.

And all for what?

I'm always grateful when Filipino authors write about our history, but as far as Martial Law literature goes, one can do so much better with one's time and money than this one.

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