Insurrecto
Ratings4
Average rating4.1
"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 Dealer's 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 Cortazar'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"--
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I would say this book is about perspectives. The two women are tryiing to tell the same historical event through their own perspectives. Chiara, the director, tries to tell the story of a tragedy that so happens in Magsalin's country and they met at a clash on how to tell these events. Understandably, Magsalin is “territorial” about her own country's history being interpreted by a foreigner. She especially side-eyes Chiara's self insertion by including a white woman in her retelling of events. But at the same time, does the same thing. Both are trying to tell their personal stories using real life events and in the end I could not blame either for their flaws.
The story could get confusing as it tries to follow different plotlines that you end up wondering which ones are fact and which ones are part of the fiction. (I did try to fact check some of these). I guess, in the end, it just means we can't fully tell other people's stories but we can at least be honest to tell our own.
Oh man! Keeps you on your toes! This is like a metafiction take on dueling screen plays. I should read more from the Philippines, I think the only other thing I've read that's even set in the Philippines is Cryptonomicon and the history of the place!
A good read, but don't expect a straightforward, simple narrative :)
