Insurrecto

Written by Gina Apostol

Narrated by Justine Eyre

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.



Insurrecto masterfully questions and twists narrative in the manner of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch, and Nabokov's Pale Fire. But at its heart this is a novel of emotional power that grapples with our endless ability to erase the past. 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Highbridge Company
• Release date: Nov 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781684414093

Gina Apostol

 Gina Apostol’s third book,  Gun Dealers’ Daughter , won the 2013 PEN/Open Book Award and was shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize. Her first two novels,  Bibliolepsy  and  The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata , both won the Juan Laya Prize for the Novel (Philippine National Book Award). Her essays and stories have appeared in the  New York Times ,  Los Angeles Review of Books ,  Foreign Policy ,  Gettysburg Review  and  Massachusetts Review . She lives in New York City and western Massachusetts and grew up in Tacloban, Philippines. She teaches at the Fieldston School in New York City. 

Reviews for Insurrecto

[castlelass · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

There is an excellent historical (and little known) story here. In the Philippine American War (1899 – 1913), forty-eight Americans were killed at a garrison, which led to an American reprisal and the killing of thousands of Filipinos. The Americans had helped the Filipinos defeat the Spanish, and then stayed on as “occupiers.”

The narrative centers on four people – a photographer in 1901, a scriptwriter in the 1970s, the daughter of the scriptwriter who is making a film of the incident in present times, and a translator (also in present times). There is disagreement between the daughter, Chiara, and translator, Magsalin, over whose perspective should take precedence in the film.

“She had a conversion into the world of the Filipino insurrectos of 1901, Chiara says. That is not the correct term, Magsalin says. What? They were revolutionaries, Magsalin says. It was not an insurrection. Chiara ignores her.”

At first, it felt like someone picked chapter numbers out of a hat. To complicate matters, there are three different timelines. I am not sure what the author accomplished by jumbling up the chapters. This period in history is already largely “forgotten,” so why not tell it in a more straight-forward manner? It is very artistic, but this is not a book for anyone that prefers linear storytelling.

This book would have easily been 4 stars if it had been organized differently. I recommend reading the author’s End Notes and Essay, which are more direct and convey essential background that the narrative does not provide. I plan to read non-fiction to learn more about this period in history.