1. In Peter Boxall's ever-tentative 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (which will have its third revision this year) that claims to chronicle "the history of the novel," Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style found a spot, arguing that pioneering anti-novels are necessarily part of the canon. Adam David's The El Bimbo Variations' homage to Queaneau's (among many other creators) earned its own place here in Atisan Novels, despite David's recognition of it as a "book of poetry" in the second printing's afterword.

2. Novel, of course, is not all about story. But if we demand story from David's book it will not fail us: its narrative source was the first two lines of a famous Filipino band's song, "Ang Huling El Bimbo," which was not unlike most of Eraserheads' songs--it has a story, it is not purely lyrical abstractions to which most pop songs exhaust their "creative" energies. It has specific characters, point of view, setting, tension, and insight--and when David decided to make 99 variations of its first two lines ("Kamukha mo si Paraluman/ Nung tayo ay bata pa"), we knew that novelization is not necessarily about a story, but the stories behind a story. Here we come face to face with plurality and endurance--two of the things we sometimes demand of art, aside from beauty, of course, which Paraluman, the simile to the object of the persona's nostalgia, should represent. In the Eraserheads song, the beloved died of the accident; in our lived reality, Paraluman is long gone. Beauty is no more. Beauty becomes memory. We are left with numbers, with probabilities, with the paradoxical attempts to create something new out of restrictive (mostly, traditional or popular) forms: diona, tanaga, dalit, ghost story, detective fiction, erotica. The stories behind the writing of these variations David did not hesitate to expose in the "Notes On These Pages," and to this framing of the book I'd give its better conflict and resolution: a writer revealing his gods and demons, explaining himself, remembering and forgetting and reminding himself of what current Philippine art needs to achieve.

3. But the two lines are not only content (signified), of course; they're also signifier. And so the majority of the experiments here dwelt with the function of words as sign, and their instability because of this, thus their tendency to variate. A missing or added letter or word, a repeated sound, the recurring or avoided letters in lipograms, univocalisms, tautograms, et. al., are a movement away from what we mean, but how we mean things, what we do to create meaning, even if meaning becomes almost obsolete in a world where we do not always value things enough to find time to look at them in 99 different ways.