Since the late 1990s, the novelist Gina Apostol has been writing highly political and highly  entertaining metafiction about the legacies of colonialism and dictatorship in the Philippines. I came to her work through her fourth novel, Insurrecto (2018), a breakout hit in which translation, so often treated like the sad stepchild of the literary world, takes center stage. Insurrecto is a riot of linguistic play and punning, as is Apostol’s debut, Bibliolepsy, which won the Philippine National Book Award upon its publication and is now being re-released in the United States. Although written more than twenty years apart, the two novels share a sense of palpable delight in language—and a palpable desire to break its bounds. Bibliolepsy is a bildungsroman whose protagonist, Primi, cares exclusively about books. She knows she is in a novel; she knows, too, that her story is political. Everyone around her resists Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship and pushes her to do the same. Even in the midst of the 1986 People Power Revolution, Primi is willing to stop reading only to pursue writers: her mission is to have sex with as many as possible. It is a portrait of a woman reckoning, very slowly, with life inside a political story—because Primi knows perfectly well that she’s in a story. All Apostol’s characters do.

PART I.