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.
