not in the mood for love

what does it mean to tell the same story over and over and over again? taking its title and central obsession from wong kar-wai’s film about unconsummated desire, not in the mood for love by jade mark capiñanes circles the wreckage of infidelity through varied forms: shitposts from a fictional facebook group called “pinoy kabetposting,” riffs on olivia rodrigo and taylor swift, a mock-academic paper on adultery in colonial philippines, love letters that might have been sent too late, and footnotes, one of which is so sprawling it threatens to swallow the book whole. written mostly in lowercase taglish, this darkly comic novel revisits the same questions about desire and betrayal from every angle, as if one more revision might finally get the confession right.