A Reckoning with Reading
Review of Bibliolepsy: A Novel by Gina Apostol (USA: Soho Press, January 2022)
By Diane Josefowicz
Jel Suarez - First green is gold (2021)
Image description: An altar-like assemblage made up of tomobako boxes and a wooden floor board. The sculpture displays two artist’s books, limestones on wooden bases, wooden blocks, playing pieces, and a framed mixed-media collage in the box shelf.
*Tomobako is the name for the wooden boxes in which Japanese artworks, such as paintings, sculptures, ceramics, porcelains, and lacquer works, are stored. They consist of a wooden body and a lid, held together by a woven or braided ribbon.
I was fourteen when, in 1986, Corazon Aquino was elected president of the Philippines after months of mass protests against Ferdinand Marcos and his regime. As I watched the demonstrations, a thread of sympathy flew from my suburban backwater in Rhode Island to Quezon City and Manila. Yellow was the color of the People Power Revolution; on TV, it was everywhere.
In other words, I fell in love with signs, having zero understanding of the realities that produced them. All I actually knew about the Philippines was Marcos was a hateful kleptocratic dictator and that his wife, Imelda, owned a lot of shoes. Although this latter detail is both puerile and irrelevant to the significance of Aquino’s ascendancy, it is germane to my reading of Gina Apostol’s new novel, Bibliolepsy. This hilarious romp through the end of the Marcos regime is unsettlingly pervaded by the topsy-turvy logic of accumulation, particularly of signs. That this accumulation has its pleasures is, Apostol suggests, something we still need to reckon with.
Jel Suarez - Inscribed on Poems (2020)
Image description: An off-white, 26-page, accordion-style, artist’s book. On each page is a collage of black-and-white drawings on light-gold backgrounds inside gold borders. The open book is displayed on a white, acrylic bookcase.
Written in the 1980s, the novel is a coming-of-age story in which a student, Primi Peregrino, grows from innocence to experience by means of literature, or more precisely, her erotic involvements with men who write it. An exceptionally devout reader, Primi notches her belt with romantic conquests she makes in bookstores and libraries. A bookshelf is her Tinder. When Primi is swept into the protests that oust Marcos and bring Aquino to power, she finds herself unmoved. She is a deeply literate erotic adventurer with a front-row seat at a revolution—and it interests her less than books and sex.
How Primi developed her kink occupies the novel’s first part, in which Apostol weaves literary concerns, including plenty of unabashedly poststructuralist wordplay, with raunchily funny sex scenes. Primi is initiated into the joys of reading when she discovers a trove of pornography owned by her father, a writer and illustrator of comic books. What Primi lacks in knowledge, older sister Annie happily supplies. “What’s fellatio, Annie?” she asks. Annie replies, “Hm. It sounds like an illness.” Together they look it up in the OED. “It impressed me then … that this word had been used in ancient times, 1887, what a long time ago, when people didn’t have much to talk about most probably,” Primi deadpans, “and they thought about fellatio.” The next word Primi looks up is penis. Her excursions into the etymology of gross and sexy things conclude with an admonition from her grandmother that reading (reading!) will make her blind.
Primi’s bibliolepsy is partly an homage to her parents. Her father, I’ve said, was a writer of comic books; her mother, a nervous taxidermist who calmed herself by repeating the names of bones, bodies of water, and the cities of the Philippine archipelago. These two care about signs, about how meaning circulates in social and political systems. Bedding writers is a way of belonging to this family of offbeat semioticians. But it also represents a bid for independence. Primi’s parents are dissidents who disappear; they are, perhaps, assassinated. This is heavy stuff, but Primi tires of the freightedness of politics. She breaks with her family by becoming intellectually light, voluble, virtually nonpolitical—a fan.
Literature engages Primi, but what she likes is literalism. Her idea of close reading is about as close as you can get. One of her lovers, Vincent Sabado, was “unknown to me at first,” she reports. What she means is that she hasn’t read him. So how does she get to know him? Not by speaking with him, as we might expect—instead, she reads all his books. This is pathetic; it is also very funny. Apostol is a brilliant comic writer, and Bibliolepsy is full of pleasurably gut-busting moments like this one.
Jel Suarez - Letters in Fragments (2020)
Image description: A gold- and olive-toned, mixed-media collage depicting abstract landscapes on handmade paper framed with reclaimed wood. The framing of the artwork resembles the shape of a tall window made up of 15 rectangular panels.
But is pleasure enough? Vaguely concerned to marry politics and desire, Primi has intuitions about how “the plot of desire” might converge with other plots. But these concerns remain abstract. As a reader, Primi wants out of politics and the history it creates. “It’s not easy to live within a novel,” she says of the protests. “One does not wish to lie awash, willy-nilly, within the commanding stream of another’s story … I’d felt the need to move out of fate’s fast-moving pen … to jump off history’s inexorably written text, the truck of time, and fall into a ravine of my own choosing.” For Primi, this escape is “the promise of sex and love—and the readings that go with them: the thrill of a moment’s stalled flesh, while the rest of the world whizzes by.” Her escapism has all the ambiguous attraction of an ad for an all-inclusive resort vacation, which might be paradise—or it might just be boring.
To make sense of her discomfort, Primi stacks up authors and tropes. To convey her sense of herself as a “vagabond from history,” Primi makes references to a whole series of figures, from Heraclitus to the Wandering Jew. But when everything seems relevant, it’s hard to know how anything is. She describes the People Power Revolution as “this wind-rushed tale of 1986,” blithely drawing an equivalence with Britain’s Windrush generation, even though the Windrush passengers were caught up in a very different process. Eventually even Primi loses patience with glib symbolic transformations: “The time comes with you get tired of getting manipulated atop poem manuscripts and look for more piercing engagements.” She returns to the bookstore, only to suffer buyer’s remorse. “I flit from one book to another, take up three or four at a time … Then I return home with this odd assortment. My bookshelf is filled with evidence of my sudden fancies and the stupid eclectic objects of my lust. Afterwards I don’t remember why I had brought them home.”
Primi is not alone in her faith that owning yet another object of desire will transform a difficult reality. A genius list-maker, Apostol shares something of Primi’s ethos, but Apostol’s tongue-in-cheek collections of detail function more critically and subversively. While Primi accumulates books and lovers to no effect, Apostol piles details into grand heaps in order to upend them. She keeps the reader on her toes. In Primi I recognize the temptation to seek salvation in accumulation. As I write amidst heaps of books, I think of Mrs. Marcos and her staggering collection of shoes. My present reverence for my library does not cohere at all with my past contempt for her closet. Something has to give. But as I read Apostol, I wonder if that’s her point: our understandings of events are not stable, and as meanings shift, new possibilities arise that we might improve upon or not, depending. Hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, ma soeur!
Jel Suarez - Folding a Landscape (2020)
Image description: An open, 56-page, off-white accordion-style artist’s book with abstract drawings and collages depicting landscapes, displayed on an acrylic slide case with engraving.
Diane Josefowicz is reviews editor at Necessary Fiction. Her debut novel Ready, Set, Oh will be published in May by Flexible Press.
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