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A review by octavia_cade
Bibliolepsy by Gina Apostol
reflective
medium-paced
3.5
I love the concept behind this: that a young woman, obsessed with books, falls compulsively in love with authors as a revolution takes place in the background. It's not even that she's in love with the authors at all, really - she's in love with books, and because she can't have sex with the written word, men who create the written word are good enough. There's a whole series of them, these transitory affairs, and Primi wanders through them and then wanders into therapy, wondering what on earth she's doing but not that invested in stopping it. Part of it's because she's looking for connection, the orphaned daughter of a cartoonist and a taxidermist who were so in love with themselves and each other that they may have thrown themselves into the sea, leaving their daughters behind.
There's an underlying weirdness here that I find very appealing, but it's never leaned on as much as I'd like, and I'm not sure that keeping the revolution so very much in the background does this book as many favours as it might. On the one hand, it's darkly amusing that Primi manages to miss nearly every political milestone as Marcos is toppled, holed up as she is with the latest writer to cross her path, but it's kind of baffling as well, how very much obsession can contribute to obliviousness. I want that political backdrop integrated more into the novel, or I want Primi's self-centredness to be so over-the-top monstrous that the whole thing reads as black comedy, or at least much blacker than it is, I think - that appealing weirdness can feel, in places, a little muffled. Revolution encourages writers, as the book points out, so it's a sexual opportunity for Primi really, and that should be hilarious. And it almost, almost is.
There's an underlying weirdness here that I find very appealing, but it's never leaned on as much as I'd like, and I'm not sure that keeping the revolution so very much in the background does this book as many favours as it might. On the one hand, it's darkly amusing that Primi manages to miss nearly every political milestone as Marcos is toppled, holed up as she is with the latest writer to cross her path, but it's kind of baffling as well, how very much obsession can contribute to obliviousness. I want that political backdrop integrated more into the novel, or I want Primi's self-centredness to be so over-the-top monstrous that the whole thing reads as black comedy, or at least much blacker than it is, I think - that appealing weirdness can feel, in places, a little muffled. Revolution encourages writers, as the book points out, so it's a sexual opportunity for Primi really, and that should be hilarious. And it almost, almost is.