Bibliolepsy
By Gina Apostol
Soho Press, 2022

Gina Apostol’s debut novel Bibliolepsy appeared in the Philippines in 1997 to much acclaim and only now makes its first US appearance courtesy of Soho Press, and the first thing readers will notice is a Jamesian preface to the US edition, an odd little affectation that’s mercifully rare these days. After all, it’s not inherently more interesting to know that Apostol thinks Bibliolepsy is “a novel about the cyclical endlessness of desiring” than it would be to know that James Wood thinks it’s about the melancholy of elk-hunting. 

The preface might be more interesting if it were some kind of metafictional commentary on the novel itself, like something that John Barth in his prime might have tried. Barth comes up in the preface: Apostol mentions that years ago she sent the opening pages of Bibliolepsy to Barth in the distant United States because she’d read and loved his novel Chimera. She goes on to say she went so far as to travel to Baltimore, where Barth was teaching at Johns Hopkins, but then she loses interest in the story and moves on to other things.

So maybe it’s metafictional after all, because Bibliolepsy is much like that; stories strike up, flesh out, and then fall by the side of the larger narrative. That larger narrative is the story of two young Philippine women, Primi and her sister Anna, who are orphaned early (their parents, both active swimmers, fall off the side of a boat and vanish without a trace). The novel is told from the viewpoint of Primi and is suffused with her lifelong love of books and writers – Apostol chooses to center things on the bookish sister, and many’s the reader who’ll wonder what a book centered on vapid, flitty Anna might have been like. 

The girls are taken into the care of an older relative, and the loss of her parents scarcely dents Primi’s love of books (“Too young even to go to school, I read everything with love and guilt”), the source of the book’s title, “bibliolepsy” being Primi’s fanciful affliction, signaled by “a mawkishness derived from habitual aloneness and congenital desire.” Primi remains so absorbed in books and reading that when she asks “What compels me to collect these memories, my ficciones, as if time were interested in itself, in the connections between minutes?”, it’s tempting to answer, “because it makes good reading.” “All stories seem to shout at you,” Primi/Apostol goes on, “minutes are blood relatives, they all connect like ordered cousins, and the beginning leads to the end, to some kind of philosophy, some furrowed forehead with a light bulb over its head.”

It’s a shame that passages like that are so rare in these pages. Primi’s book-saturated story is written almost entirely in the flat, rehearsed cadences of old, often-told family tales. The narrative is at its most interesting when it’s dealing with Primi's many meetings with idealistic young poets like Vincent Sabado or writers like Juan Somerset Chong: “He could pursue an objective correlative to its expected conclusion like an ant finding a sugerplum or a wise pigeon going home. He was a natural at writing stories I admired but could not stand.” But she herself often comes across as tediously self-absorbed, far more interesting as a catalyst than as a main ingredient. She works best as a spotlight shining on the striving writers (living and dead) all around her, and maybe that’s what bibliolepsy is like.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.