1. The novel is made possible by divisions. Coetzee divided the book into two sections called "Strong Opinions" and "Second Diary" in order to differentiate issues extrinsic and intrinsic to the self, only to reveal that they're actually both driven by external events on the one hand, and limitations of intellectual and affective visions on the other. Additionally Coetzee divided each page into essays supposedly written by Señor C, an aging Australian writer born in South Africa, who wrote a novel called Waiting for the Barbarians, not unlike Coetzee himself; his narration of encounters with and thoughts of Anya, a Filipina who never lived in the Philippines whom he invited to work as his typist; and Anya's observations of Señor C's writings, and of his actions and reactions towards her.

2. An excerpt from Señor C's essay, "On terrorism,": "... a secret is an item of information and as such falls under the wing of information science, one of whose branches is mining, the extraction of scintillae of information (secrets) from tons of data. The masters of information have forgotten about poetry, where words may have a meaning quite different from what the lexicon says, where the metaphoric spark is always one jump ahead of the decoding function, where another, unforeseen reading is always possible." He liked to call his brand of political thought "pessimistic anarchistic quietism, or anarchist quietistic pessimism, or pessimistic quietistic anarchism," even if he doubted his own qualification as a thinker.

3. Anya recognizes herself, and knows that she's most probably viewed, as "racy, exciting, exotic" yet "just the little Filipina"--but with a tinge of irony, which is the only probable tone Coetzee could have given her, if he would like to survive in our age of political correctness. She even teased, that is return the gaze to, the old man when he asked her where she was born: "Why do you want to know? Am I not blonde-eyed and blue-haired enough for your tastes?" Señor C was speechless, but in another occasion, upon seeing Anya's clothes "enough to outfit a middle-sized cathouse," he asked if she had "a shoe collection too." Filipinas are remembered for how little they are, and how extravagant. But Anya remembered her mother as someone very loyal to her Australian father, and mused: "That is how we are, we Filipinas. Good wives, good mistresses, good friends too. Everything good."

4. Movies, aside from literary works, are among Señor C's immediate intertexts in his essays, like Kurasawa's Seven Samurai and Kubrick's film adaption of Lolita. His was a commissioned series of essays because he admitted to no longer have the endurance needed for writing novels. He told Anya that, "To write a novel you have to be like Atlas, holding up a whole world on your shoulders and supporting it there for months and years while its affairs work themselves out."

Anya was eager to tell the old man, however, that his essays, especially the one about the terrorists, were a bit "idealistic" and "unrealistic," and then shared her own uncle's encounters with the Islamists in Mindanao, who don't mind dying if it could bring nearer "the day of the battle to end all battles, when the infidels are defeated and Islam takes over the world." She was so opinionated, a "little Filipina typist who thinks she knows everything," that Señor C wondered if Anya was the real mother of the thoughts he was putting down on paper. But, really, where does authorship begin and end?

1. The tragedy of lost opportunities is what makes most stories sad; but being unaware of this tragedy is what makes them effectively poignant. And poignant was the life of Leopold Gursky, who unknowingly was robbed authorship of a novel called The History of Love; he entrusted it to a friend and was betrayed without him ever knowing. Further he was estranged from his own son who grew up to be a famous writer and died searching for his father--something our old guy was also not fully allowed by the fates to know.

Needless to say, Gursky grew old living alone, and prepared himself to die alone. In his wallet was an index card that says: MY NAME IS LEO GURSKY I HAVE NO FAMILY PLEASE CALL PINELAWN CEMETERY I HAVE A PLOT THERE IN THE JEWISH PART THANK YOU FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. The thing is that, "He learned to live with the truth. Not to accept it, but to live with it. It was like living with an elephant. His room was tiny, and every morning he had to squeeze around the truth just to get to the bathroom. To reach the armoire to get a pair of underpants he had to crawl under the truth, praying it wouldn't choose that moment to sit on his face. At night, when he closed his eyes, he felt it looming above him."

2. Krauss balanced the heavy drama in Gursky's life with the charming innocence with which fourteen-year-old Alma Singer, named after the beloved in Gursky's novel, tried to search for the author of the novel that his father gave her mother as a gift. The excerpted chapters ("The Age of Glass," "The Birth of Feeling," "The Age of String") from Gurksky's novel are equally delightful, almost poetic, reminiscent of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in their mythic texture.

3. Of course Leo loved to read, as did Alma. He devoured Anna Karenina, Ulysses, the works. Meanwhile, the young girl's hero was Antoine de Saint-Exupery (whose The Little Prince was read to her by her father when she was six). Leo's son, who pretended to be his own character in able to search clues for the whereabouts of his father, wrote to Alma's mother: "You also asked what I do. I read. This morning I finished The Street of Crocodiles for the third time. I found it almost unbearably beautiful." One time, Alma caught her mother reading Cervantes, "the most famous Spanish writer," her mother claimed. These are people whose lives are somewhat occupied by literary works, lives in which literature still has some power.

4. A little mention of the Philippines, through Alma: "Henry Lavender... told us about his collection of seashells, many of which he'd dove for himself on trips to the Philippines." I would not even go to issues of legality; it was fiction, obviously, and worse crimes happen everyday. But moments like this, no matter how brief, or precisely because they were brief, reveal so much of how a nation is commonly condensedly perceived from the outside. This one: apparently driven by a vision of the country as of tourists, some place to go to when you need to collect things.

1. This is Calvino's story of a boy who decided not to walk this earth, quite literally, but to live on trees instead--as narrated by his younger brother, who realized early on that he would live a rather contrary, normal life.

2. The younger boy is Biagio: the writer, who had a weakness toward stasis, and consequently became the preserver of text. The older boy Cosimo who would grow up as the baron was the singer of tales, and "was swept by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful; the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality." Cosimo's seeming abandon caused Biagio much deliberation in his written versions: how valid would be his disbelief when those things did not actually happen to him?

3. Cosimo's friendship with the brigand Gian dei Brughi in Chapter 12 is a story that could stand by itself. They shared the love of reading--as with many other novel heroes before them--and exchanged books, mostly novels. Gian dei Brughi lost interest with banditry altogether, something that worried his younger apprentices, who threatened to set dei Brughi's copy of Richardson's Clarissa on fire if the reluctant bandit would not go back to his old ways. Because he no longer had his heart in thievery, dei Brughi was caught and put on trial. Before his execution, the only thing he wanted was to know how Jonathan Wild's story ended in a novel by Fielding's. In the end: the need for closure, even if it was only imagined; or: the only closure we're guaranteed in this life is a fiction.

1. Calvino admitted that he wrote this romanzo "almost for fun," and that he was "not prepared for the outcry that greeted it." His idea of fun: to thrust a character into the middle of a war between Christians and Turks and have a cannonball fired "right in his chest," splitting him into the novelist's own Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde. Later the two halves would fall in love almost inevitably with the same woman, leading to their reunion in the end, but only after a bloody duel & a few people's intervention--a closure that was almost bound to happen yet I wished the novelist avoided, even if only to arrive at an ending that was as disagreeable as the premise.

2. Now I could understand an outcry, but more for its narrative discontentment, rather than for what it actually contains. Perhaps Calvino was aware of this, and so he sent away Dr. Trelawney, with whom our young narrator "found a companion such as [he] never had," aboard Captain Cook's ship, while the boy, who also happened to be the viscount's nephew, was "deep in the wood telling [himself] stories."

1. Still the trademark Robbe-Grillet obsession with details, with visuals. But towards the end, near the end, the soldier who until then was mostly just the observed, the object of the I's gaze (who told us s/he was alone, in the very first sentence of the novel), was now allowed a glimpse of his interiority--even if only to justify the compulsion to record the surroundings: "... the soldier is still perturbed by such a gap in his memory. He wonders if anything else in his surroundings might have escaped him and even continues to escape him now. It suddenly seems very important to make an exact inventory of the room."

2. The novel begins with I and ends with me, and yet s/he does not reveal anything about her/himself; s/he's the least known in the end. The self is ultimately the location of the most intricate of labyrinths.

1. Somewhere in the middle of the novel the narrator reported that A and Franck had both finished reading this African novel that they'd been discussing for sometime. Robbe-Grillet, via his narrator, made a commentary on the nature of our "readings" of texts--on how we focus not on "the novel's value" but on its "reality," and so we blame the characters for certain acts, or we comment on the implausibility of some events, and we even suggest alternative outcomes, although we know that in the end, nothing could be changed, the "reality stays the same." But I would like to underscore the tendency of interpretations as mentioned by Robbe-Grillet: "They seem to enjoy multiplying these choices, exchanging smiles, carried away by their enthusiasm, probably a little intoxicated by this proliferation... ." Intoxication by proliferation. This is the ecstasy of reading, the apex of interpretation. To multiply meanings--to be more than what the text probably is or was just intended to be.

2. The narrator/husband refers to himself as the "third person"--in front of A and Franck's, and unlike these two, he does not read the African novel they are so enthusiastic about.

3. To the jealous every moment becomes present, again and again; he reviews the same scenes, hears the same words--from the same angle, from the same distance, although with a different focus.

4. "A novel whose action takes place in Africa" was lent by Franck's to A--and it gave connection to the two of them; yet the novel turns out to be a symbol of the narrator's disconnection from his wife, the unknown, what couldn't be fully shared with him, what he could only half-guess. The novel connected Franck and A even if, paradoxically, it provided them with different, and sometimes opposing, understandings.

5. When the narrator had to describe the novel towards the end, based on what he could get from the conversations, he summed it up as, "Psychological complications aside, it is a standard narrative of colonial life in Africa, with a description of a tornado, a native revolt, and incidents at the club." In other words: Not unlike Jealousy (or Robbe-Grillet's narration of it), he wants to strip the novel of "psychological complications" and so everything is seen from the outside--toward the physicality of things; and also, that there's really nothing special with the novel at hand: it is a "standard narrative"--and with the label comes the expectations of its contents.

1. I first read this novel as an M.A. thesis called “Kamatayan sa Piling ng mga Lilang Nimpeya” back in 2001. Yapan changed the novel’s title in its eventual publication for it to reflect, perhaps, the various senses in “mata” that the narrative attempts to deal with. The most obvious of course is “mata” as sense of sight.

In Filipino, we use our eyes to have paningin and pagtingin, which may connote opinion and affection, respectively. In the novel, we get to know the stories from Esteban’s point of view, an albularyo who supposedly saw all that could be seen in the events that he recounted, even those that only his sixth sense could witness. Of course, he did not have only his “views” of the things that happened in Sagrada; he also certainly had emotional stakes in them for they involved Selya, the one he used to love but could not help in the moment (perhaps one of the most central “sandali” in the story) she needed him most. If Esteban’s view of things seemed very intimate, there were also distant pananaw and pagtanaw, like the opinions of the unnamed people of Sagrada when they learned of Estela’s suicide in the beginning of the novel.

2. Mata could also mean “the center” or “from where things come,” as in the “eye of the storm,” and this certainly does not overread for Sagrada is in Bicol, one of the regions most visited by typhoons in the Philippines—and the chapter “Mga Bahay sa Gitna ng Bagyo” dealt with the very naturalist relationship of the space’s climate and weather to the internal and external conflicts that the characters had to deal with.

3. Mata, when used as a verb in Filipino, could additionally mean two things. One is “to make obvious, to reveal.” We say this to people in frustration of their inability to see commonsensically. This is probably Esteban’s reason why he had to write the stories he already narrated before: the textuality of the story corners it, makes it subject to the storyteller’s gaze, unlike the fluidity and context dependence of oral narration, that is more likely the reason why deaths ensued after Nene, and later, her son, Boboy, “heard” the stories of their epic heroes. They misheard or missed entirely the metaphors that function as both representation and revelation at the same time, like the unbridled presences of snakes and Oryol throughout their family history and the local history of Bicol. Mata could also mean “to devalue” someone or something (as in “matahin,” “ipamata”): and so this is also certainly a story of reviewing the marginalized, those outside the center. For example, the woman, the native and the uneducated that Agatha somehow represents.

4. In the end, mata, when pronounced as máta, is also death, the inescapable death that was expressed more overtly in this novel’s first working title. The novel began with Estela’s death, and it was maybe a death that had to happen—not just for her, but—for the child in her womb to end the curse of Nuevas growing up fatherless, like Boboy and Nene did.