Gina Apostol

Two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte's Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created "a howling wilderness" of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara's film script and writes her own version. Through these two rival scripts--one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher--find their way to their own truths and histories. -- adapted from publisher info

A Novel

Insurrecto

This book is a TRIP! Reading Insurrecto really is like the experience of peering through a kaleidoscope - the image shifts and fragments and rearranges itself in every chapter, leaping between different decades like whiplash. 

But just like a kaleidoscope, no matter how much images fragment and scatter and change, you're still ultimately viewing the same subject. The structure is truly convoluted, and that's exactly why it's so beautiful and astounding to me. 

I have to mention too how meta this book gets. Not only am I getting whiplash over the back and forth of time, but I'm being tugged in and out of reality by protagonists Magsalin and Chiara as they Salt Guy-sprinkle in their meta commentary and have me questioning whether the stories I'm reading are "real" or are all invented in one of these women's heads for their books and movies. 

I love books that put me through a ride. This was one hell of one. This is a book that drives home (in its many meandering cliffside paths at high speed) how history repeats itself, and how I - as a Filipino-American, or merely, as a human descended from an age of imperialism and war and resistance - am made of the multitude of convoluted histories of many different clashing worlds that have left traces of themselves in me. 

I can feel my brain spinning as I sit thinking about this one.

joana ashley

This book is a TRIP! Reading Insurrecto really is like the experience of peering through a kaleidoscope - the image shifts and fragments and rearranges itself in every chapter, leaping between different decades like whiplash. 

But just like a kaleidoscope, no matter how much images fragment and scatter and change, you're still ultimately viewing the same subject. The structure is truly convoluted, and that's exactly why it's so beautiful and astounding to me. 

I have to mention too how meta this book gets. Not only am I getting whiplash over the back and forth of time, but I'm being tugged in and out of reality by protagonists Magsalin and Chiara as they Salt Guy-sprinkle in their meta commentary and have me questioning whether the stories I'm reading are "real" or are all invented in one of these women's heads for their books and movies. 

I love books that put me through a ride. This was one hell of one. This is a book that drives home (in its many meandering cliffside paths at high speed) how history repeats itself, and how I - as a Filipino-American, or merely, as a human descended from an age of imperialism and war and resistance - am made of the multitude of convoluted histories of many different clashing worlds that have left traces of themselves in me. 

I can feel my brain spinning as I sit thinking about this one.

Isabella

BEAUTIFUL ! IMMENSELY MOVING ! GINA APOSTOL DID : THAT ! HER MIND ! will reread this soon 2 fully grasp the wonder of this book but wow ! please read it if you can get ur hands on a copy !

"A bravura performance."--The New York Times Histories and personalities collide in this literary tour-de-force about the Philippines' present and America's past by the PEN Open Book Award-winning author of Gun Dealers' Daughter. Two women, a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker, go on a road trip in Duterte's Philippines, collaborating and clashing in the writing of a film script about a massacre during the Philippine-American War. Chiara is working on a film about an incident in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901, when Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison, and in retaliation American soldiers created "a howling wilderness" of the surrounding countryside. Magsalin reads Chiara's film script and writes her own version. Insurrecto contains within its dramatic action two rival scripts from the filmmaker and the translator--one about a white photographer, the other about a Filipino schoolteacher. Within the spiraling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women--artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters--finding their way to their own truths and histories. Using interlocking voices and a kaleidoscopic structure, the novel is startlingly innovative, meditative, and playful. Insurrecto masterfully questions and twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, and Nabokov's Pale Fire. Apostol pushes up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, and in so doing, she shows us the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war that would shape the next century of Philippine and American history.

Insurrecto A Novel

Reviews