Insurrecto
Written by Gina Apostol
Narrated by Justine Eyre
4/5
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About this audiobook
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.
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.
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Reviews for Insurrecto
40 ratings1 review
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5There 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.