Days of 1521

Rajah Versus Conquistador by Kahlil Corazo (Pagecraft, 2025)

 

Blood Compact Reimagined (2020) by Herbert S. Pinpino, oil on canvas (Source)

 

The rajah was Rajah Humabon, the conquistador was Ferdinand Magellan. The versus was their fateful encounter in 1521 Cebu when the Spanish and precolonial Philippine cultures went on a collision course. It was a consequential time that would define the culture and history of a country-in-the-making. 

The historical novel was written by Kahlil Corazo who assembled a rich tapestry of historical details and steeped his scenes with cultural specifics of 16th century pre-Hispanic Philippine society. His fiction was a well-conceived story of an early power struggle between a native leader of Cebu and a visiting conqueror from halfway around the world. The story unfolded in switching registers of diplomacy and war, from psychological warfare to bloody combat, dramatizing what one character called the "complex machinery of statecraft". 

And what a feasible story it was, a narrative grounded in human nature and game theory, borrowing from the tactical strategies of chess and the "prisoner's dilemma" situation. Hovering between the two diametrically opposed characters were two conflicting customs and rites, representing two approaches of political science, that of the binukot's and the baylan's. Humabon's wives, Paraluman and Pilapil, were the proponents of the two forms of power.

"[T]he baylan must control the sacrifice," you explain, your voice carrying absolute certainty. "They understand that the Bakunawa's hunger cannot be denied, but it can be directed. Through their wisdom, the king's power becomes sacred rather than merely brutal. They transform random slaughter into holy ritual."

In contrast to the impulsiveness and violent human offerings of the baylan, the binukot way of seeing things through was a calm and calculated political strategy. Tutored by two strong women in the two ancient ways of sisterhood, Rajah Humabon possessed the two gifts (or skill sets) in his own being. It split his personality and marked him as an exemplar of both statecraft and statesmanship. His legacy as a leader would depend on how he would deal with the Spanish galleons at his doorstep. 

It was the year 1521. An armada of three Spanish ships arrived, captained by a Portuguese. Magellan was a conflicted historical character to be reckoned with. In the background, the hyperbolic figure of Lapulapu, almost stereotypical in his war freak mentality and outsized physique, sword-wielding and ready to enter into any transactions that involved spilling blood. Amid the direct confrontation between the animist beliefs of the rajah and the Christian virtues of the conquistador, the people of Sugbo were faced with an unusual choice: to be modernized by new Christian beliefs on charity and forgiveness and love or to sustain the old rituals that demanded sacrifices of human beings (slaves) to appease the old gods. 

The literary, cinematic, and pop culture recreation of 1521 was never lacking, almost always centering on the Battle of Mactan, with Magellan dying into the hands of the fierce warrior Lapulapu. Novels that tackled the subject include Viajero (1993) by F. Sionil José, Longitude (1998) by Carlos (1998), Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan (1938) by Stefan Zweig (translated from the German by Eden and Cedar Paul), and  Lapulapu: The Conqueror of Magellan (1938) by Vicente Gullas (translated from Cebuano by Erlinda K. Alburo).

The Western perspective of the encounter was perfectly captured by Stefan Zweig in his novel Conqueror of the Seas: The Story of Magellan (also published in a switched title, Magellan: Conqueror of the Seas). Zweig's historical novel was one-sided. His was an arguably romantic, colonialist, and racist account of the first circumnavigation of the world. His motive for writing the novel was driven by a dubious and condescending shame, trickling from the arrogance of comfort and elitism. On the other hand, the novel by Gullas, prefaced by a long critical essay by Resil B. Mojares, was a wide-eyed, cartoonish account of Lapulapu's heroics. (For context on why Zweig's novel left a bad taste in my mouth, see this post: Stefan Zweig's shame.)  

Lapu-Lapu by Francisco V. Coching (Images from Unang Labas, Klasika Pelikula)

In the realm of cinema or literature, there was no dearth of Lapulapu extolment. The vintage film Lapu-Lapu (1955, directed by Lamberto V. Avellana) was an adaptation from Francisco V. Coching's serial graphic novel. It was an amusing watch (watch it in Vimeo) despite the one-dimensional and stereotypical characters and the heavy nationalist slant. After an extended Battle of Mactan scene at the movie's climax, with the surviving Spanish soldiers scrambling for safety and retreating to their ship, it ended with a stirring speech from the Mactan warrior, played by Mario Montenegro. The native islanders crossed ranks with Lapulapu as he lashed out at the foreign invaders, in a voice very close to breaking point, while in the background played the music of the national anthem, composed in 1898.

Another movie, Lapu-Lapu (2002, directed by William G. Mayo) was top-billed by Senator Lito Lapid. I've watched snippets from this movie; the less said about it, the better. The miniseries Boundless (directed by Simon West, trailer), starring Rodrigo Santoro as Magellan and Álvaro Morte as Juan Sebastián Elcano, appeared in 2022. Like Zweig's narrative, it dramatized the perils and human folly of circumnavigating the globe. Add to this roster of visual propaganda the film 1521 (directed by Michael Copon, 2023, trailer). Its English speaking cast of characters included Danny Trejo as Magellan and Michael Copon as Lapulapu. 

Earlier this year, slow cinema auteur Lav Diaz edited and released the Gael García Bernal–starrer Magellan in Cannes (teaser). It was a 2.5-hour movie, culled from a projected nine-hour director's cut. Lav Diaz shared in interviews that, based on his years of research, he came to the conclusion that Lapulapu was not a historical figure, that he was just a mere invention of Rajah Humabon. (The things a researcher unearths or thinks he unearthed when there's nothing to unearth.)

Gael García Bernal in Magellan (2025, directed by Lav Diaz). Photo by: Hazel Orencio (The POST)

The "primary source" of all these historical intrigues was the written account of Pigafetta, the scribe who put to paper his observations, and perhaps Enrique too, the translator who bridged the communication between the Spaniards and the pre-Filipinos. Who could say a version of history was revisionist if in the first place the original speaker and the original writer already colored their subjective accounts with their own biases?

An alternative to these dubious literary and cinematic versions of history was Rajah Versus Conquistador, Kahlil Corazo's first novel, no less biased perhaps for its own chosen historical slant. It differed in many respects to the Magellan-Humabon-Lapulapu fictional accounts and historiography.

Kahlil Corazo took on the two viewpoints: the native rajah's and the Portuguese conqueror's. He even had the gumption to use the second-person point of view in the two alternating narratives of his larger-than-life characters. Corazo bared the psychology behind his characters' thoughts and actions, rooted in behavioral and political sciences. 

He focused on the dueling psyches or split personalities of Humabon, as well as on Magellan's missionary zealotry and self-delusion. The novelist's delineation of the thought processes of the two characters propelled the logic of his story. The good thing is that novel did not have the bombast and purple prose of Zweig, and it did attempt a balanced perspective where each character was given equal chance to tell their side of history. 

Also a far cry from Zweig's colonialist and elitist viewpoint and stereotypical portrait of the ignoble savage, Corazo's retelling of events in the first half of 1521 was no less savage in its neo-animist perspective, which rather made for a postcolonial treatment of history. Where Zweig manifested the figure of Lapulapu as "a ludicrous human insect", Corazo's image of Lapulapu, from the point of view of Magellan, was no less reductive.

Though the Kapitan cannot understand Lapulapu's words, something primal in him responds to the warrior's presence. Like a deer at a river's edge sensing a crocodile beneath the still waters, his body tenses almost imperceptibly. You see how he straightens in his white garments, as if the purity of his cloth could shield him against this tattooed giant who moves with the deceptive calm of an ancient predator. Even through your fear, you recognize that instinctive reaction – the moment when one hunter realizes he has become prey. 

Whether a "crocodile beneath the still waters" or "tattooed giant who moves with the deceptive calm of an ancient predator", Lapulapu was still every inch the image of a stereotypical warrior-hero, but the novelist had at least imbued his tragic and simple figure with all-too-human vindictiveness and comic possibilities. In fact, the three major characters in this passion play – Magellan, Humabon, and Lapulapu – were all tragicomic figures. The novelist was not after historical facts, he was going after psychological nuance and political ideas.

Final insight: the true circumnavigation is not of the world but of the soul, returning at last to its Creator, having learned what could only be taught through the journey itself.   

Corazo's research went a long way to dramatize not only the human motivations but the political economy of pre-Hispanic Cebu, even offering a portrait of early free market capitalism which foreshadowed the unquenchable thirst of greed capitalism.

"There is one diwata emerging in our ports," Handuraw said as you walked. "The Hokkien merchants call it wealth, the Gujarati call it trade, but these are merely faces it wears, like masks at a ritual. The baylan call him Sapî. He grows alongside the old powers, feeding not on blood like the spirits of raid and war, but on desire itself." 

"Sapî grows stronger with each generation," Handuraw continued. "He feeds on the endless hunger for things from distant shores. The Hokkien bring porcelain, the Gujarati bring cloth, the Siamese bring gold – and with each trade, Sapî's power grows." 

It was more than just portraits of two leaders on opposite sides; it was a love letter to 16th century Sugbo (Cebu) society, an early imagining of a community of nation and a nation of community.

“Sugbo binds thousands to an idea,” she said. “This is a different kind of power, one that grows stronger rather than weaker as it spreads.” 

You saw how this force, this diwata called Sugbo, could grow beyond the limits of personal loyalty or physical coercion. A datu might command a hundred warriors through force of personality, but Sugbo could move thousands through pride of belonging. 

The implications staggered you. If what Handuraw said was true, then the real power of a port lay not just in its weapons or wealth, but in its ability to capture the imagination of its people. Every feast you hosted, every display of prosperity and strength, every act of justice or generosity that enhanced Sugbo’s reputation— these were not just tools of power but offerings to this new kind of diwata.

The Rajah Humabon side of history was here no longer an untold, shameful "side story" deliberately skirted around in Philippine historical narratives. It was here front and center in all its moral ambiguities and historical ramifications. The reckoning of history was often always a reckoning of inconvenient trickery and massacres. While Humabon was treated as a secondary figure in the charade of history, Corazo gave him a distinctive voice, someone who occupied in fact a focal role in history, who himself made history. 

Corazo also interwove in his story the previously hidden feminist aspects of culture and history. He showed how women were active participants in/of historical destinies. In a "fictional" afterword, the novelist talked about the theme of the novel: the gendered nature of power.

We also hope this translation offers Western readers a glimpse into how history looks when viewed not from the deck of a Spanish galleon but from behind the woven walls of a payag, where women who never appeared in colonial chronicles nevertheless shaped the course of events through their influence on powerful men and their own direct wielding of power. 

The undercurrents of politics were the novel's golden currency. Rich with ideas on politics and cunning, tactical prowess in war and diplomacy, the slow burning decision map inside Humabon's head followed the branching of chess moves and countermoves. 

"Four virtues," you [Humabon] muse, "and not one for cunning." 

* * * 

You've learned from Handuraw that true power grows in the spaces between order and chaos. The serpent within you writhes in anticipation of how this foreign faith might crack open the rigid structures of your society. Like a lover's touch that begins gentle but promises exquisite passion, these small disruptions will spread through your domain, creating delicious new possibilities for those who know how to ride the storm. Just as Handuraw taught you to savor the moment when katsubong first enters the blood – that sweet instant between wholeness and corruption – you understand that true power flows from controlled transgression. Each small disorder you introduce only makes your eventual dominion stronger, more complete. 

The leadership of Rajah Humabon was Machiavellian. His cunning was directed not only toward self-preservation but for the prosperity and persistence of Sugbo in history. His complexity emanated from his sincere attempts to control naked power using his two skill sets, to move the chess pieces around him of their own accord. He deployed his tactics through statecraft and delicious cunning and deception. 

Filmmakers and novelists had projected a lot of things on the characters of history, including their own colonialist biases and colored prejudices. They had been misguided in depicting (and we had been inept in understanding) the "other", favoring the truths of their own culture and civilization because their comfort zone could no longer imagine beyond their second nature and primal urges. They could no longer look beyond their own points of view. And we had consumed a lot of history appropriated and distorted in various permutations.

In Rajah Versus Conquistador, Corazo delivered a nuanced interpretation of history: heady, inspired, and feasible. It was a compelling version and vision of 1521, a provocative addendum to the national imaginary. In it, the characters interact not wholly in words but in body language. Every gesture was of fatal import, and power wore the skin of a chameleon before rearing its timeless hydra head. The novel was a refreshing counterpoint to the hagiographic and colonialist biographies and films of Magellan or the nationalist myth-rendering of Lapulapu in many misdirected novels and films about him. 

"The most effective lies are those wrapped around a core of truth", wrote Corazo in the novel. Perhaps only the untethered imagination of fiction, and fiction of imagination, could allow us to view historical events with a grain of truth. Corazo's recovery of Humabon through fiction was a recovery of a lost point of view.

Restoration of Rajah Humabon statue in Cebu (Image from SunStar Cebu)

 

Fourteen poetry impressions: On Sonetoismo, volumes 3 to 5

 

Tatlong Libong Araw (Three Thousand Days), Anyo ng Kalatagan (The Lay of the Land), and Sa Halip na mga Bulaklak (Instead of Flowers) by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles (De La Salle University Publishing House, 2025)

     1) The Japanese conceptual artist Kawara On (1932–2014) produced a fascinating series of date paintings that function like totem poles for human existence. Each date painting celebrated one more day of life lived on Earth. The stuff of ordinary lives, the minutiae of the daily grind, the friction between pop culture and modern realities – they were memorialized by Kawara into tablets bearing months, dates, and years. The timestamp of our momentary existence was turned into treasures of lived experiences.

Sonetoismo, the seven-book cycle of modern sonnets by Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles, tipped its hat off to Kawara's creations. The indefatigable poet borrowed Kawara's sense of time and timelessness into lines that scan the paradox of memory, the simple snapshot of the beauty and horrors of modern life.

     2) "There are millions of suns left," wrote Whitman and quoted in Filipino by Arguelles in "Kalahating Soneto" (Half a Sonnet), the opening sonnet (albeit a half-sonnet) in Tatlong Libong Araw (Three Thousand Days), the third volume of Sonetoismo. The half-sonnet was a play on the Filipino word araw which means both "day" and "sun" in English. When translated into English, the double-meaning of araw was broken. The celestial body sun was a totem pole for the passage of days. The translator would choose between day and sun to render araw and the unity of time (day) and its arbiter (sun) would be lost. Dichotomies emerged from language swallowing meanings whole.

     3) Sonetoismo, in its first five published volumes to date, along with the accompanying monograph "Not the Stuff of Sonnets": Ilang Talâ sa Sonetoismo (Notes on Sonetoismo, 2024), appeared to view the sonnet form with utter suspicion. Form was a constraint; it was a prison of one's making. The poet had all the freedom to break from the sonnet form, to demolish and shatter it like a poet-activist committed to bringing down structures of naked power in a manner and method it could readily muster: the unstoppable lines of poetry. That was perhaps what committed art means. In "Octavio Paz," the poet aligned itself with the Mexican poet's call for growing a conscience and bearing witness: "Pero nauunawaan ko / si Paz, kailangang / may saksi, may budhi / upang may lumaya" (I understand / Paz, witness / and conscience are needed / to regain freedom).

     4) Hence, the poet made his assault on form – the 14-line sonnet – through exploration of various linear and graphic innovations and possibilities to re-form form. Facebook posts turned into sonnets, a playlist containing 14 songs, combinations of a tic-tac-toe game, art exhibition posters, song lyrics. The self-imposed prison of the sonnet was there for the escaping. The poet of innovation was a fugitive running away from regimented meter, rhyme, measure, and whatnot. The poet of creativity was as resourceful as MacGyver. He had a use for every material that comes his way, a function for every knickknack. He could get out of any sticky situation. If he saw a flying saucer, he could transform it into a sonnet.

     5) A sonnet from the third volume, followed by my translation:

                    Sonetoismo

                    Maliit ang bahay,
                    ilang dipa lang
                    ang dulo't dulo.
                    Pero ngayong
                    ako ang naiwan
                    at walang masilip
                    na araw sa labas,
                    para akong nasa
                    palasyo. Kasya
                    ang tatlong libong
                    araw ni Kawara
                    o maging daang
                    libong bilyong
                    tula ni Queneau.


                    Sonetoismo

                    A miniature house,
                    just a few yards
                    from end to end.
                    But finding myself
                    here, alone,
                    unable to glimpse
                    the sun outside,
                    it's as if I'm inside
                    a palace. Holding
                    three thousand
                    days of Kawara
                    or even a hundred
                    thousand billion
                    poems of Queneau.

     6) Raymond Queneau (1903–1976), author of the form-breaking Exercises in Style (translated by Barbara Wright), published his famous flip-chart poetry collection Cent mille milliards de poèmes (A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), the Guinness world record holder for the most number of sonnets (and poems) included in a single book. More than a poet, Queneau was a mathematical genius.

In the sonnets assembled in Sonetoismo, Arguelles was as if distilling the works of Queneau and the other proponents of the Oulipo movement, the literary innovators of the day. A symptom of his radicality was already evident in his poetic works, collected in Atra: Mga Tula 1999–2019 (Isang Balangay Media Productions, 2020), a generous compendium from a twenty-year career of a poet in constant search of radical breaks and radical forms.

In his oeuvre, we saw how the poet curated his ideas and pieces with great care, juxtaposing improvisation with found objects. In the true spirit of daring experimentalists – Alfred Jarry in The Ubu Plays (translated by Cyril Connolly and Simon Watson Taylor), Walter Abish in Alphabetical Africa –avant-garde, surrealism, cubism, progressive cinema found footing in Sonetoismo's formal and whimsical inventiveness.

Innovation has no limits.

     7) Beyond form, the poet filed his protest on subject matter too. Pop culture rubbed shoulders with literary arts. Random thoughts and occasions merged with art appreciation, dissolving the boundaries between high and low. What are these labels anyways? What is not the stuff of sonnets? Who decides what is and is not sonnetable? No one is a gatekeeper of sonnetry. Any one can gatecrash the party. One could simply ask to be let in. Or hack the system if refused entry. Forget the Senate. There’s nothing unimpeachable that the sonnet can’t impeach.

     8) The cover art of the septology featured works by the artist, writer, and curator Koki Lxx (stylized name of Koki Lee). Lee arranged the G-lock, a reusable plastic material used in resealing bread, into configurations of calendar days and months. The use of this color-coded material representing expiration days was almost inspired by Kawara's dates. One colored G-lock represented a day of the week. In his monograph, the poet said that each volume of the sonnet cycle would number to around 50 poems or so and would eventually total to some 365 poems, a year's harvest of a daily sonnet.

(I owe the identification of the G-lock in the book covers to my daughter S. who loves loaf bread. She recognized it when I was trying to identify the material.)

Image of G-lock from Yummy.ph

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six-hundred minutes, five hundred twenty-five thousand moments so dear. / Five hundred twenty-five thousand six-hundred minutes – how do you measure, measure a year?

     9) We could trace Arguelles's propensity for breaking forms in his previous experimental outings, notably in his erasure poetry, as in Gera (War), Pesoa, and Three Books, the latter two appearing in translations by Kristine Ong Muslim. In his review of Gera, Rise already observed the author's habit of constructing something from the ashes of destruction, producing monstrosities that defied categorization.

The title Gera was abbreviated from Gerilya, the 2008 novel of Norman Wilwayco. The poet Mesándel Virtusio Arguelles prepared his black highlighter pen and attacked Wilwayco's novel. Like what he did in Pesoa (2014), derived from Rene O. Villanueva's childhood memoirs Personal, he crafted yet another constellation of erasure poetry, redacting to his heart's content, assiduously leaving out extraneous material, contracting blocks of narrative into floating words. He ruthlessly deconstructed Wilwayco's novel and murdered the past. He declared war against semantics to construct a new monster.

It's no wonder the second volume of Sonetoismo was called Monstruo.

     10) "Soneto [Playlist]" was a screenshot of an actual Spotify playlist compiled by a certain Ayer, 14 songs in all with running time of around 55 minutes. The first song was spoken poetry set to music: "Nang Salakayin Mo Ang Aking Pananahimik" by The Axel Pinpin Propaganda Machine (listen to it here). It was an odd title for an opening "song", let alone the first line of a sonnet. The poem (translated here) was from Axel Pinpin's collection Tugmaang Matatabil (Irreverent Verses). The list also had three brooding songs by Zild. I haven't played and listened to the whole song list yet.

Can a musical playlist be an actual sonnet? The answer to this rhetorical question would make for a good subject of a sonnet.

     11) In an unauthorized non-interview of the poet, a clueless reader bombarded Ayer with questions about the composition of the sonnets. He was hard put to elicit sonnetic ideas from the poet. Everything the poet had to say about his project to date was already sonnetized in the five volumes and in the companion monograph "Not the Stuff of Sonnets". What was apparent was how the sonnets themselves, constituted as whole, formed into a commentary on life and art, the poet's own and those of his chosen precursors. It was a curated enterprise that sometimes mimicked or commented on other art forms. By volume five, the focus concentrated on three figures: Agnes Martin and her grid paintings, Abbas Kiarostami and the framed shots of his last film, and Mikhail Tal and his masterful chess moves on a chess board.

In "[Kuwadro 23]" ([Frame 23]) under the section called "Kuwadro [Abbas Kiarostami]", the poet ended his sonnet with a rhetorical question, "Ano ba ang tula / kundi ang tunog na ito?" (What is a poem / but this selfsame sound?) The italics were in the original.

In the facing page, "[Kuwadro 24]", another question was asked, "Saan nga ba nagwawakas ang / ang buhay at nagsisimula / ang sining?" (Where does life / end and art / begin?)

     12) Paintings, film frames, chess games. They contained the symptoms of sonnet form that speaks to other art forms and mental games, to exercises in style.

In Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual, translated by David Bellos, the narrative shifted from one character to the next, the shift being dictated by the knight's move in a chess, corresponding to the location of the character's room in a housing complex. This Knight's Tour was the narrative constraint of an experimental novel, a spatial configuration seemingly amplified in the compositional strategy of the work. 

The Knight piece of chess played a big part in Mikhail Tal's games and in Arguelles's appropriation of the tablero (chessboard) for his sonnets on the decorated life of Mikhail Tal.   

     13) A sonnet can be a diary entry, a commentary on art and games, an artifact of history, an ekphrasis. Time mediates all of them.

Interesado ang manlilikha sa oras. O higit pa, kung paano mapatitigil ang oras. Karera sa oras ang buhay at tanging oras ang nananalo, pero hindi ibig sabihi'y susuko na tayo. Sa isang obra ni Balisi, ipininta nya ang tapyas na mga mukha ng orasan. Sa pinta, walang paglalahad ng oras. Nasa isang kuwadro lang ang lahat. Walang nakaraan at kinabukasan. Kasalukuyan ang tinutunghayan.

* 

Sa paggawa, gamit ang mga kamay at madalas kaysa hindi, naipapako ng paggawa ang ating mga kamay habang gumagawa hanggang wala nang iba pang magawa, wala nang magagawa. Mga manggagawa tayong walang palad sa kamay ng kapital. Kailangang magkuyon ng palad, magtaas-kamao. Sa mga ipinintang tapyas na mukha ng orasan ni Balisi, makikita ang mga kamay na napako sa sandali ng paghinto o paghinto ng sandali. Isang araw, hindi na tayo mapapaikot sa mga kamay ng orasan.

 

[The painter was interested in time. But more than that: how to stop time. Life is a race against time and time always wins, but it doesn't mean we'll just give up and surrender. In one of Balisi's works, he painted the broken face of a clock. In the painting, time was at a standstill. In a single frame, everything was frozen in time. Past and future did not exist, Only the present counted.

* 

In labor, we worked with our hands and more often than not, our hands were tied to the labor while at work until no work could be done any longer, no work was forthcoming. We were laborers at the mercy of the hands of capital. We had to clench our fists and raise them high. In Balisi's paintings of broken faces of the clock, we recognized the hands frozen at the moment of their stoppage or the stoppage of their moment. One day, we would no longer be beholden to the hands of the time.]

– from Sa Ibang Kariktan (Another Beauty) by Arguelles (The University of the Philippines Press, 2024):

     14) "Sonetong Walang mga Kuwarteto" (Sonnet Without Quartets) was only a couplet, having lost the three quartets: "Hindi minsang karanasan / ang karahasan kada araw" (A daily dose of violence / is not an unusual experience). So was "Sonetong Walang mga Kuwarteto [Drug War]": 

                    Kung balewala
                    sa iyo ang pagpatay.

                    If killing
                    is your thing.

That sonnet should be framed and accompany Digong in The Hague.

     15) The sonnet called "Sonetong Walang Isang Salita" was a blank page. The title could mean "Sonnet Without a Single Word", but "walang isang salita" was a Filipino idiom meaning someone who is not a man of his word, or who reneges on his word and breaks his promise under oath. A faithful translation of the poem (or rather the title, since below it was a blank page) could be as follows. 

                    Sonnet Which Failed to Keep Its Word 

 
                    
                    
                    
                    
                    
                    
                    
                    
                    
                    
                    
                    
                    
                    

     16) The above non-poem (or non-sonnet) by Arguelles called to mind José García Villa's (1908–1997) blank-page poem called "The Emperor's New Sonnet". Arguelles's terse depiction of a politician was as loud as Villa's stark-naked poetry. The two were linked by a dash of whim, a sprinkle of whimsy, and a hint of whimsicality. If it was worth its salt (pardon the pun), a sonnet had to emerge from its long tradition of summer's day, God's grandeur, doomed youth, and the many ways a love is compared to. The emergent property of a sonnet had to transcend the fixed number of lines of its traditional existence. The modern sonnet not only had to break free from the shackles of convention. It had to fly. It had to stop time.

     17) The last poem in volume 3:

                    Walong-Linyang Soneto

                    Ito ang mga linya ng tulang pinagyaman
                    sa bundok. Nilinang mula sa mga kamay
                    ng ninunong mataimtim na nagmasid
                    sa lawas ng katahimikan ng kagubatan,
                    ng kapatagan, at ng kalangitan. Narito
                    ang hagdan-hagdang kariktang bumababa
                    sa lupa at idinadambana kong unibersal.
                    Mga baiting na kailanman ay di-mabilang.


                    Eight-Line Sonnet

                    Here are the lines of a poem nurtured
                    in the mountains. Polished by the hands
                    of ancestors solemnly gazing
                    at the expanse of the hushed forest,
                    of the plains, of the heavens. Here
                    are terraces of beauty descending
                    on earth and which I extol as universal.
                    The steps that can never be counted.

     18) Like the orthogonal steps of rice terraces carved on the curving ridges of mountains, the discrete sonnet could contain infinite lines too.

     19) What isn't a sonnet? What can't a sonnet do? What can't a sonnet make one do?

     20) I’m off to listen to some songs. 

San Jose, Antique

August 19, 2025

     

The master of Go: On The MANIAC, 4

 

Novel-writing, like playing Go, is an art of assembly. The novelist compiles and assembles facts and artifacts. The novel has to be built on strong foundations to produce the proof of concept. Since it's not erecting an actual building, it has the luxury to bide time and cut corners for the stones to connect later on and to conquer more territory.  

"Lee or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence" was an extended coda to The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut. A standalone short novel, this section was assembled and adapted from various online materials: news, interviews, documentary movie, live streams of the five Go matches including the press conferences, comments by Go fans and veteran players on the YouTube live feeds, illustrated Go match commentaries by veteran players (e.g., Game 3 commentary), science articles, articles from peer-reviewed journals about AI mastering the game of Go (e.g., Nature 1, Nature 2, Science, Nature 3). 

The word "delusions" in the section title was prominent in AlphaGo (2017), a riveting documentary directed by Greg Kohs. The documentary supplied the narrative structure of this section of the novel. In places, this last section of The MANIAC was a reshoot of the documentary. The human interest behind the five Go games in this section of the novel—the battle between a human grandmaster and a super-intelligent machine—tried to match or attain the suspense generated in the AlphaGo documentary, in Kawabata Yasunari's journalistic account (The Master of Go), and in the recent Netflix feature The Match (directed by Kim Hyung-joo). 

Go was like breathing to him [Lee Sedol], a process that he could not stop: “I always think about Go. There is a Go board in my head. When I come up with new strategies, I place stones on the board in my head, even when I drink, watch dramas, or play billiards.”

The source of the quote was Lee's 2013 interview in Korea JoonAng Daily.

I always think about baduk. There is a baduk board in my head. When I come up with new strategies, I place stones on the board in my head even when I drink, watch dramas or play billiards.

That was practically verbatim, with the word "baduk" replaced by "Go". In the novel, an anecdote was told about Lee: 

“One time, he and I drank together until two in the morning, but after that he invited me back to his house, falling down drunk, to go over a game he had just won, and replayed every stone, white and black, because even though he had won the match, he said there was one move—made by himself!—that he didn’t quite understand,” said Kim Ji-yeong. [emphases added]

It was basically the same story—with details added (the ones emphasized above)—from a 2016 article in the same Korean daily:

“One time, he and I drank together until 2 in the morning, but he went back to a game he had won and repeated every single move because he said there was one move he didn’t understand,” said Kim Ji-yeong, a Baduk TV anchor. 

Lee lost to AlphaGo in the first three games. Game 4 proved decisive.

[Lee] took longer and longer before each move, cocking his head to one side, as if listening to a far-off rumble that only he could hear. By move 54, Lee’s clock had just 51 minutes left, while AlphaGo’s had 1 hour and 28 minutes of available time. The game inched forward, and just like before, it looked as if Lee was already on the verge of defeat; reporters began to crowd outside the playing room as the rumor that the fourth game would be the shortest of them all began to spread online. Nevertheless, Lee did not react, and played slowly, cautiously, avoiding direct confrontation, giving up almost the entire board to his opponent. “Is he not afraid to die?” Fan Hui wrote in his notes, despairing at Lee’s stubborn refusal to engage with the computer. Fan was so close to him physically that he could almost hear Lee’s thoughts and feel what he was waiting for, and soon he fell into the same trancelike state that had mesmerized the Korean grandmaster. By move 69, Lee was down to just 34 minutes, while his opponent still had over 1 hour and 18 minutes left. [emphasis added]

Labatut made modifications in his retelling of the match by compressing the events and paraphrasing the commentaries. Here's Fan Hui's published commentary on Game 4 (pdf):

As the game progressed, it seemed to everyone that Lee was once again on the verge of defeat.

White played the atari at 56, followed by the hane at 58. When Black ataried at 59, White had the option of linking up the group on the top. See diagram 7. Instead, however, Lee chose to pull out his center stone and extend at 62. With White's group now isolated and in grave peril, Lee's heart must have been overwhelmed with emotions. But perhaps he also sensed the long awaited moment at hand.

At move 63, Lee Sedol had 42 minutes, AlphaGo 1 hour and 22 minutes.

At this point, people suddenly began to congregate near the playing room. The rumor was spreading that the game was about to end, with AlphaGo victorious as expected. But Lee looked cool headed as ever as he played the turn at 68. Was he really not afraid of dying? [emphases added]

"People" in the commentary became "reporters" in the novel, giving more specificity and concreteness to the scene's fiction. "Was he really not afraid of dying?" became the more compact "Is he not afraid to die?"

The inspired move that turned things around was move 78. This was Labatut's version:

“The hand of God! That is a divine move!” shouted one of Lee Sedol’s historic rivals, Gu Li, jumping up from his seat in the Chinese webcast. Like a bolt of lightning, Lee’s 78th stone tore AlphaGo’s position apart, striking at the heart of the board with a wedge move unlike anything anyone had seen before. People went wild with excitement. [emphasis added]

This was cribbed from the commentary, with some variations.

At last, Lee Sedol launched his attack. Like an earthquake, the wedge at 78 tore apart the cracks in Black's fortress! None of us had anticipated this. When Gu Li saw White 78 from his broadcasting studio in China, he shouted: "The divine move!" All of Lee's painstaking preparations were finally about to bear fruit. [emphasis added]

Labatut's version captured the essence of what went on, replacing the "earthquake" with "bolt of lightning" and adding to the exclamation of the Chinese commentator Gu Li and other spectators.

“That would be so cool if it works,” said Chris Garlock, an American commentator, completely stunned. “That is such an exciting move. It’s going to change the whole game,” said his colleague at the DeepMind YouTube feed, Michael Redmond, agog at the potential that Lee Sedol had managed to find inside his opponent’s dominion, at a place where no other Go player in the world would have had the audacity to dive in.

In the actual commentary beginning at around 3:10:21, the sequence of comments made by Michael Redmond and Chris Garlock was reversed, and their comments were shortened and spliced from what were said in the YouTube footage. Here's the actual exchange in the video [emphases added].

Redmond: This is—. Oh, look at that move. That's an exciting move. [more comments while demonstrating scenarios and moves on the Go wall board] It's going to change the equation in this one. [more comments]

Garlock: Oh that's gonna change things.

Redmond: Now black cannot escape.

Garlock: That would be so cool if it works [more comments].

The cut made by the novelist actually followed the one in the documentary film. It's as if the novel was fictionally building on the documentary's editing of reality. Later in Game 4 of the novel:

When he saw what was happening, Demis Hassabis snuck away from the players’ room as quietly as he could and ran down the stairs, storming into the control room just in time to watch the head programmers huddled in front of a screen, where AlphaGo’s probability of winning had just fallen off a cliff. “Did anything strange happen before it started acting this way?” he [Demis] asked them, and when everyone replied that, just a few moments before Lee Sedol played his wedge move, everything looked normal—hell, better than normal, AlphaGo had been massacring Lee—they had nothing else to do but hunker down and try to contain the sinking feeling in their stomachs, as they realized that their worst fears were now coming true: AlphaGo had become delusional.

In the documentary (after around 1:07:48 timestamp), Demis made the remark, "It looks like it has fallen off a cliff". In reality, it was David Silver who asked the question made by Demis in the novel. David's question in the documentary was incomplete, in fact: “Did anything strange happen in the [pause]?

“What’s it doing there!” Hassabis screamed as he saw the next move that the computer was considering.

Demis made a similar remark but he hardly screamed. The scream was the novelist's touch, given the tense circumstances. 

At one point Demis commented in the novel, “It knows it’s made a mistake, but it’s evaluating it the other way. I mean, look! Look! Lee is confused. He’s like, What’s it doing? That’s not an I’m scared look, that’s a What the fuck is it doing? look [profanity emphasized].” 

His actual words in the documentary were not exactly like that (Labatut added a bit here and there) but essentially the same. However, Demis did not utter the fuck word in the documentary. The novelist did. The latter was heightening the frustration of the AI creator about the defeat of AI at the hands of a mortal in a game the machine had supposedly mastered.

In another live feed commentary, Kim Myungwan asked a question (at timestamp 1:59:36), "What's going on?" 

The same scene was incorporated in the documentary (1:09:13) but was followed by the remarks Andrew (Myungwan's partner commentator) made earlier (1:58:00 in the Myungwan commentary). The documentary spliced together the conversations in the Myungwan commentary live feed, maximizing the power of editing granted this art form.

In the novel, Myungwan's question at 1:59:36 also appeared. It was followed by Andrew's responses spliced from Myungwan commentary at 1:47:12 and 1:48:12 and combined in the documentary at 1:07:35. The novel made a different response to the question but followed the liberties made by the documentary in re-sequencing the events.

At the blunder made by Alphago, the novel quoted a female host from a live broadcast of a South Korean TV station. 

“Oh, that is ridiculous!” shouted the female host of one of seven South Korean TV stations that were broadcasting the match live. “Is it a mouse mis-click from Aja Huang? No, that’s the move. These are not human moves. It’s inexplicable. Those are mistakes, clear mistakes. For the first time in four matches, we have seen AlphaGo make mistakes. I think Lee Sedol found a chink in its armor. He found the weakness in the system,” she added as everyone watched the champion stare at the board, clearly as confused as everyone else. It took AlphaGo more than twenty moves to recover its sanity, but by then it had completely lost control of the game. [emphases added]

The quotes were attributed to the female host. In reality, she only uttered only the first exclamation (1:09:47 in the documentary). The rest of the statement followed (in the documentary) but these were not made by the host. They were spliced from statements of the other commentators: Myung-wan, Andrew, and the American commentators Garlock and Redmond. (I was not able to verify who made the last statement in the above quote.) 

In Game 5, one commentator in the novel said, “Perhaps this is what 10, or 11, dan play looks like? It [AlphaGo's move] looks weird, it looks ugly, it just doesn’t make sense to us.” The statements were actually made by another person being interviewed in the documentary. Different speaker, slightly different speech in the documentary: “This is what 10 or maybe 11-dan play looks like. It looks weird, and we don’t quite understand it.”

In the novel, Lee's statements during the press conferences following the matches were spliced together from his actual statements during (a) the press conference, (b) the awards ceremony, and (c) his sit-down interviews for the documentary. The novelist sometimes imputed words not said or added flourishes to what were actually uttered. "Mind-blowing game", Demis would say in the final press conference. "This is the most mind-blowing experience of my life," the novel would say inside quotations. Garlock made a comment during the press conference that we'll be talking about these games for years to come. This will be integrated into Demis's speech during the press conference that the games "will be discussed for a very long time to come." Demis said in the novel during press conference, "For me it’s the culmination of a twenty-year dream", but he actually said this in an interview (not press conference), saying instead "For us" and not "For me". Labatut perhaps used the singular to hark back to the back story on Demis at the beginning of the novel's coda.

In the novel, AlphaGo was awarded an honorary 9 dan certificate after Lee left the stage. In the documentary, Lee was present during the awarding ceremony.

Labatut made liberal adjustments to what was said or what really occurred in the YouTube videos and other sources. He merged dialogues from various sources, supplied a precís or a paraphrase of statements, rearranged the chronology of scenes, shortened or expanded or rephrased and conflated the conversations made by various personalities, compressed time, and mis-attributed statements. To what ends? Were these deliberate infelicities meant to preserve the momentum of the story and the human interest? For continuity and dramatic tension? It's not real after all, this fiction. The drama is in the details.

These novel-writing tics were hallmarks of the works of Sebald and (to some extent) Kawabata. These tendencies to recreate events in a different plane of reality, similar to how the German novelist bent Pepys's diary entries to fit his own fiction and how the Japanese novelist tinkered with facts to add drama to his reportage. To bravely lie and flout facts: the stuff of true and truthful novels. 

Because the truth is incapable of accomplishing social understanding, "Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language." We're going back to the ideas put forward by Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper, in The Book of Disquiet.

I’ve lied? No, I’ve understood. That lying, except for the childish and spontaneous kind that comes from wanting to be dreaming, is merely the recognition of other people’s real existence and of the need to conform that existence to our own, which cannot be conformed to theirs. Lying is simply the soul’s ideal language. Just as we make use of words, which are sounds articulated in an absurd way, to translate into real language the most private and subtle shifts of our thoughts and emotions (which words on their own would never be able to translate), so we make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth – personal and incommunicable – could never accomplish. 

 

This is the fourth and final blog post in a series about Labatut's novel about the role of science and scientists in developing WMD and AI technologies.  

When we cease to tell the truth: On The MANIAC, 3

 

Seen from the outside, some stories have more truth than others, but the truth value of the story does not depend on its actual truth content. – W. G. Sebald 

What matters is whether we want to lie or to tell and write the truth, even though it never can be the truth and never is the truth. Throughout my life I have always wanted to tell the truth, even though I now know that it was all a lie. In the end all that matters is the truth-content of the lie. – Thomas Bernhard 

Type "John von Neumann" in YouTube and one of video clips that pop out is his guesting in a 1950s American TV show (link).

 

In The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut, the video clip was described by Klára Dan, Neumann's second wife. 

He [Neumann] had just come home after doing something that was completely unheard of for him: he had appeared on television. It was one of those saccharine programs intended for “young adults,” which I’m sure that nobody ever enjoyed, Youth Wants to Know—it ran on NBC for almost a decade. Government officials, renowned sportsmen, and noted scientists were questioned on subjects of current interest by an eager panel of boys and girls. Johnny was forced to participate as part of a PR campaign set up by the Atomic Energy Commission, and I almost cried with laughter when it aired: in his episode, he is surrounded by a huddle of children dressed in their Sunday best and is interviewed by a chubby blond boy with a buzz cut and a bolo string tie. No more than sixteen years old and already a head taller than my husband, that teenager asks him a series of inane questions—Does the United States have enough educated technicians to operate all the new technologies that are popping up? Are there are [sic] sufficient scholarships for young people?—queries that my Johnny answers with such gentle saintlike patience that you would think he was America’s favorite uncle, all smiles and nods, ambling about with his head weighed down by a massive microphone hung around his neck, as they tour an exhibit inside a nuclear power plant, with the program’s presenter leading him by the arm and pointing out several thick cables on the floor, so that my spouse, who is moving in his usual distracted manner, won’t trip over them as he expounds on the inner workings of Geiger counters, scintillators, and other instruments used to measure radiation, still completely unaware that his own exposure to that very same energy during the atomic tests had already cost him his life. That ridiculous little TV program is the only extant record, the only film of him that exists. How can that be? A genius lowered to the status of a bumbling tour guide.

In the age of deepfake and hyperdata, everything was verifiable. Truth was a commodity subject to evaluation and fact-checking. 

Was Klára Dan's opinion of the "saccharine" TV program Youth Wants to Know her own or was it invented by Labatut? This question could not be verified unless there existed a written account about Klára's views about the TV incident. There was an unpublished autobiography of Klára.

"No more than sixteen years old and already a head taller than my husband", said Klára in the novel, but in the video one could see Neumann was just the same height as, if not a bit taller than, the boy who asked the question. The taller one was the one behind Neumann.

True or false, invented or not, the passage above was telling us more about the state of mind of Klára than that of his husband: her bitterness at the cause of her husband's cancer due to radiation exposure.

The method of narrative appropriation, imputing words on historical characters, was central to the artifice of fiction and almost always invited questions on authenticity and ethics. Fiction was aesthetic appropriation and approximation, as Max Sebald explained. Thomas Bernard was more succinct and direct: All that matters is the truth-content of the lie.

A novel is not fact-checked but truth-checked. There is a difference. For Lisbon-based Bernardo Soares, assistant bookkeeper and author of "A Factless Autobiography", entire passages might contain a few or many lies but still be entirely true. Soares believed in the necessity of lies. According to him, we lie because we are social animals.

We make use of lies and fiction to promote understanding among ourselves, something that the truth – personal and incommunicable – could never accomplish. 

Art lies because it is social. And there are two great forms of art: one that speaks to our deepest soul, the other to our attentive soul. The first is poetry, the second is the novel. The first begins to lie in its very structure; the second in its very intention. One purports to give us the truth through lines that keep strict metres, thus lying against the nature of speech; the other purports to give us the truth by means of a reality that we all know never existed.

If they are any effective, the truth-content of images in a writing are but a smokescreen of the characters' inner feelings. They could be evocative because they are accessible by other's feelings when faced by the same situation, the same dramatic tension.

The last section of The MANIAC—the five-match duel between Lee Sedol the South Korean grandmaster and world champion of Go and AlphaGo the AI program developed by eventual Nobel Prize laureate Demis Hassabis's team at Google Deepmind—was a further invitation to truth-checking in fiction. This was a standalone section that rivals the suspense in Kawabata's The Master of Go, the Japanese novelist's reportage of a 1938 Go match. 

Labatut seemed to follow Kawabata's principle: "Since I was reporting on a match sponsored by a newspaper, I had to arouse interest. A certain amount of embroidering was necessary." Cross-checking Labatut's "facts" with the available online materials showed more than "a certain amount" of embroidery. It was almost a reshoot and re-editing of the documentary film, AlphaGo (directed by Greg Kohs), on which the Go matches of whole section was anchored. Labatut's fictionalized version of Lee vs AlphaGo was a textual documentary spliced from various tweaks of facts and truth-contents of lies. 

Factual fiction?: On The MANIAC, 2

"Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet" was how W. G. Sebald titled the first of four parts of his prose work Vertigo (1990, tr. Michael Hulse, 2000). Its opening sentence: "In mid-May of the year 1800 Napoleon and a force of 36,000 men crossed the Great St Bernard pass, an undertaking that had been regarded until that time as next to impossible."

A glance at the contents of Benjamín Labatut's The MANIAC revealed three sections with Sebald-inspired titles: "Paul or The Discovery of the Irrational", "John or The Mad Dreams of Reason", "Lee or The Delusions of Artificial Intelligence". The opening sentences of the first two sections were patterned after the Sebaldian opening move (indicative of how Max Sebald, just like in Labatut's Un verdor terrible (2020), remained a guidepost in the novel's composition).

One afternoon in the 1840s, as George Boole walked across a field near Doncaster, a thought flashed into his head that he believed was a religious vision. Boole suddenly saw how you could use mathematics to unlock the mysterious processes of human thought. 

The Chilean novelist used the same tricks of the German novelist: extended digressions, serpentine sentences, a chain of ideas and thoughts delivered in manic pace. For good measure, the The MANIAC even contained three black and white photographs strategically positioned in between its discrete parts, making it a true specimen of photo-embedded fiction. 

The same Sebaldian tendency to recast or gloss over factual information – to fictionalize for aesthetic purposes (or otherwise) – was amply displayed in Labatut's novel. The first parts of the novel focused on the mathematician John von Neumann, foregrounding intimations and presentiments about the harm of AI or AGI (artificial general intelligence). The narrative followed a Rashōmonesque style of telling: Neumann's various acquaintances and family members bore witness about him and the milieu of his time. 

The MANIAC of the title was acronym for an actual computer machine, but it was also implied to be Neumann with his bloated figure and all-caps personality. His photographic memory and monomaniacal intelligence kept him apart from his peers; his morals were suspect. His computational abilities were legendary. Neumann's mathematical work in game theory and self-replicating machines paved the way for the development of AI machines. 

I now shudder at the accuracy of some of his prognoses, prophecies that no doubt came from his incredible capacity to process information and to sift the sand of the present through the currents of history. That gave him a certain sense of security, an overconfidence that would no doubt have betrayed a lesser man. But Janos [Neumann] was many moves ahead; he behaved as if he was looking back at things that had already happened.

While AI was often anthropomorphized or personified in this novel (and elsewhere in books and other media), Neumann was here likened to a computer processor or mental machine. The novel tended to depersonify him as an inanimate, intelligent machine: an AI himself.

The Neumann parts of the novel were almost hagiography, or its inverted sense. It was consistent about its subject's outsize influence on the scientific and mathematical problems of his day and of the current era. 

The MANIAC was essentially a long version of When We Cease to Understand the World. The eco-anxiety in the latter was here transmuted into other chilling ventures of modern science: nuclear arms race, H-bomb, supercomputing, AI. The Manhattan Project section directly complemented scenes from the Oppenheimer (2023) movie. 

Of the cast of characters that populate the novel, Richard Feynman provided a distinctive, energetic voice in the narrative even if his parts recounted the development of the atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb by a bunch of genius scientists in Los Alamos.  

* * * 

Labatut was transparent in providing the source materials. They were listed at the novel's end. Any reader who had time on their hands could investigate and review how the novelist appropriated the primary materials for his own fictional purpose and integrated them into the schema of The MANIAC. 

Biographies of Neumann and other scientists, memoirs, science journal articles, blogs, live-streamed videos of Go matches with professional commentaries uploaded in YouTube, expert analyses and summaries of the Go matches, TV footage and audio recording uploaded in YouTube, documentary films. The reference materials could be easily accessed and cross-checked and a comparison could be made to see how fiction was spun out of these materials.

Below was a "lateral reading" of a passage from the novel and a book on Neumann. 

Labatut, The MANIAC

William Poundstone, Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb (1993, p. 66, as quoted in musings and rough drafts)

How could such a little country [Hungary]—surrounded as it was by enemies on all sides and torn between rival empires—produce so many extraordinary scientists in so little time? ... He believed that our country’s outstanding intellectual achievements were not a product of history or chance, or any kind of government initiative, but due to something stranger and more fundamental: a pressure on the whole society of that part of Central Europe, a subconscious feeling of extreme insecurity in individuals, and the necessity of either producing the unusual or facing extinction.

Stanislaw Ulam recalled that when Von Neumann was asked about this “statistically unlikely” Hungarian phenomenon, Von Neumann “would say that it was a coincidence of some cultural factors which he could not make precise: an external pressure on the whole society of this part of Central Europe, a subconscious feeling of extreme insecurity in individual, and the necessity of producing the unusual or facing extinction.”

I'm not sure if Labatut sourced his information from William Poundstone's book. The left passage simply reworded the text found in Poundstone's Prisoner's Dilemma, except that the speaker on the left was Eugene Wigner while the right was a recollection from Stanislaw Ulam. Nothing earth-shattering so far. 

Unless one is doing a dissertation or fiercely interested in the subject matter, one does not have the luxury of time to closely read the published biographies and nonfiction – e.g., Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson and John von Neumann by Norman Macrae – to detect the novel's deviations from factual information.

Contents available online (YouTube) would provide readers a better idea of how Labatut assembled, fictionalized, and stitched together the facts he collected on his subjects. That would make for a more accessible approach to understanding the fictionality of what the novelist called "a work of fiction based on fact".

My next post/s on the novel would try to investigate the "truth-content of the lie" (after Thomas Bernhard).