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Book | Searching... Andover - Memorial Hall Library | FICTION APOSTOL | 31330008732095 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Chelmsford Public Library | FIC/APOSTOL | 31480011192223 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Methuen - Nevins Memorial Library | FIC APO | 31548003217735 | Searching... Unknown |
Book | Searching... Newburyport Public Library | FIC APOSTOL G | 32128003702983 | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
"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.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Apostol (Gun Dealer's Daughter) fearlessly probes the long shadow of forgotten American imperialism in the Philippines in her ingenious novel of competing filmmakers. Chiara Brasi, daughter of the director of The Unintended, a Vietnam War movie shot in the Philippines, comes to Manila to make her own film. She hires Magsalin, a translator, to take her to the Philippine island of Samar (near where Magsalin was born) and the town of Balangiga, site of a brutal American massacre of revolutionaries in 1901 during the Philippine-American War. Chiara and Magsalin craft two very different scripts for the film. One script focuses on Cassandra Chase, a well-connected photographer who travels to the Philippines to produce stereographs of the American military's actions. She faces extreme hostility from the soldiers, including the inexperienced and devoutly Catholic Capt. Thomas Connell. The second script more elusively follows Caz, a Filipino school teacher, who mourns the death of an eccentric film director she had an affair with in the 1970s. This is a complex and aptly vertiginous novel that deconstructs how humans tell stories and decide which versions of events are remembered; names repeat between scripts, and directors suddenly interrupt what feels like historical narration. Apostol's layers of narrative, pop culture references, and blurring of history and fiction make for a profound and unforgettable journey into the past and present of the Philippines. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Adjectives like humorous, playful, and ingenious seem almost disrespectful when describing a book anchored by the worst massacre of U.S. Army soldiers in the decades after Custer's defeat. The little-known 1901 Balangiga massacre in Samar, Philippines, during the Philippine-American War resulted in the deaths of 48 Americans. In retaliation, the occupying U.S. military razed the surrounding area, killing 2,500 to 50,000, depending on who is doing the counting, blamer or blamed. With shrewd insight, inventive plotting, and stinging history lessons, Apostol, who received the PEN Open Book Award for Gun Dealers' Daughter (2012), puts the unremembered Philippine-American War on display, deftly exposing a complicated colonial legacy through the unlikely relationship between a U.S.-educated Filipino translator and a visiting American filmmaker. Chiara, whose father directed a cult Vietnam film in the Philippines decades earlier, arrives to make a movie of her own. She hires Magsalin to translate her script, but the result produces two disparate versions. As the two women journey toward the massacre site, their screenplays unfold, overlapping, intertwining, even scattering, which demands the reader's careful participation in paring and parsing dueling stories within stories. The multilayered challenge, enhanced by the presences of Elvis, Muhammad Ali, various Coppolas, and a sprawling cast of characters both historical and imagined, proves exceptionally rewarding.--Terry Hong Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LATE-LIFE LOVE: A Memoir, by Susan Gubar. (Norton, $25.95.) The influential literary critic blends tales of her marriage, her cancer treatments and her husband's age-related infirmities with discussions of works whose meaning has changed for her over time; her rereadings confirm her talents as a teacher. MORTAL REPUBLIC: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, by Edward J. Watts. (Basic, $32.) By the second century B.C., the proud Roman Republic had been brought low by inequity, corruption and populist politicians. Since America's founders modeled it on the Roman example, Watts, a historian, warns that it behooves us to understand what went wrong over 2,000 years ago. MUHAMMAD: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires, by Juan Cole. (Nation, $28.) Cole offers an ambitiously revisionist picture of the father of Islam, replacing the idea of a militant leader with one of a peacemaker who wanted only to preach his monotheism freely and even sought "multicultural" harmony. INSURRECTO, by Gina Apostol. (Soho, $26.) Set in the Philippines, this novel raises provocative questions about history and hypocrisy as it follows two women with dueling modern-day film scripts about a colonial-era massacre. MY BROTHER'S HUSBAND: Volume 2, by Gengoroh Tagamé. Translated by Anne Ishii. (Pantheon, $25.95.) A sweet satire of Japan's taboo against gay marriage, this manga-style graphic novel is a sophisticated investigation into the nature of love, marriage, divorce, bereavement and nontraditional child-rearing. IN OUR MAD AND FURIOUS CITY, by Guy Gunaratne. (MCD/Farrar, Straus & Giroux, paper, $16.) Gunaratne's striking, Bookerlonglisted debut unfolds over a few restless days in a workingclass Northwest London suburb. Despite the rush of drama indicated by its title, the book should be read for its quieter details - Gunaratne, with a gift for characterization, presents the kinds of Londoners not often seen in contemporary fiction. THE DAY THE SUN DIED, by Yan Lianke. Translated by Carlos Rojas. (Grove, $26.) This brutal satirical novel takes place on a single night, when a plague of somnambulism unleashes a host of suppressed emotions among the inhabitants of a Chinese village. The ensuing chaos is promptly struck from the official record. TELL THEM OF BATTLES, KINGS, AND ELEPHANTS, by Mathias Énard. Translated by Charlotte Mandel. (New Directions, paper, $19.95.) In this intoxicating novel, set in 1506, Michelangelo sets up shop in Constantinople to design a bridge connecting Europe and Asia. SLEEP OF MEMORY, by Patrick Modiano. Translated by Mark Polizzotti. (Yale, $24.) The Nobel laureate's dreamlike novels summon elusive, half-forgotten episodes. Here, that means Paris in the '60s, love affairs, a flirtation with the occult and a shocking crime. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Guardian Review
A screenwriter and a film-maker clash in this complex story of loss and grief. "I wonder if we are stuck in bad movie plots we make ourselves," says Magsalin, the character at the centre of Gina Apostol's thrillingly imagined and provocative inquiry into the nature of stories and the unfolding of history in our collective consciousness. The remark is made in one of many terse conversations she has with an American film-maker, Chiara Brasi, who has come to the Philippines to shoot a movie based on her father's experience in the 1970s of making a film about a notorious massacre of 1901. Magsalin reads Chiara's script and objects not just to the accuracy of certain details and the viewpoints it adopts, but to the very motivation behind it. A Filipina translator and mystery writer on her first visit to her home country after many years in New York, she decides to put things right by writing her own script. In this jostle for primacy, narrative strands collide, history doubles back on itself, characters real and imagined merge into one version of events, only to be pulled apart again by Magsalin's constant interrogation of Chiara's - and her own - understanding of the history of the Philippines. As we follow the two women's competing ideas on how and why we retell history, the question of whose version should take precedence gives way to a meditation on whether that story - or indeed any other - can make any real difference to our lives. At the heart of the novel lies the massacre of 30,000 Filipinos by American troops in Balangiga, in retaliation for the killing of 30 American soldiers in an uprising of nationalists (the notion of "insurrection" and the negative connotations of being an insurrecto as opposed to a freedom fighter is just one thing Magsalin objects to in Chiara's script). One of these so-called insurrectos is the real life figure Casiana Nasionales, who becomes the protagonist in Magsalin's script; the fictional Cassandra Chase, an American who photographed the bodies of the murdered Filipinos, figures prominently in Chiara's version. Who is the true protagonist? Which of the writers has the stronger claim to historical and cultural authenticity? To some extent the novel is tackling the issue of cultural appropriation, but it never ventures close to anything like a crass attempt at resolution, instead using the complexity of its narrative and thematic structure to hint at the difficulty in understanding the confluence of history, power and the individual. None of it is designed to be easy for the reader, and the organisation of the novel constantly gives the impression of being in search of something that lies just beyond the grasp of total comprehension. "An abaca weave, a warp and weft of numbers, is measured but invisible in the plot. Chapter numbers double up. Puzzle pieces scramble. Points of view will multiply. Allusions, ditto." In describing her film script, Magsalin is also describing the novel we are reading - a conscious articulation of the way Apostol is trying to reconfigure how we think of the historical novel. Insurrecto's concern lies chiefly with the women's motivations behind the telling of these stories rather than the detail or plotlines of the actual narratives. "The story Magsalin wishes to tell is about loss," we are told quite plainly, and in this telling, "Any emblem will do". But through the snippets of her experience, artfully yet movingly distributed through the novel, we learn more than enough to figure out that Magsalin's motivations are not just political. "A poor and underfed student from the provinces," Magsalin's departure from her home country is expressed as an act of freedom, but her prolonged separation from the Philippines creates an anxiety within her that proves difficult to explain. Why was she unable to return, even when her mother was dying? Several times she recalls her mother's last phone call. "Do not come home, I understand," her mother says, but like Magsalin herself, we don't fully comprehend the reasons for her staying away, and the novel's energies hint at a deep-seated need to strip away the layers of the exile's relationship with home and family. Loss and the inability fully to grasp what it means, or how grief can be healed, similarly lie behind Chiara's movie project. She is haunted by the messiness of her parents' marriage and the death of her film-maker father when she was very young. She can't decide how her own movie will remember him: she wants to resurrect him but in the end, he still dies. In the disconnect between the aloof, designer-clad Chiara of today and the vivid portrayals of her as a child in the 70s that we gain through her mother Virginie's eyes, Apostol reveals a lifetime of pain and estrangement that ultimately mirrors Magsalin's.
Kirkus Review
Demanding, baffling, and ultimately exhilarating examination of a forgotten moment in U.S.-Philippine history.Cinematic in its approach, Apostol's (Gun Dealer's Daughter, 2012, etc.) fourth book alternates between aerial shots, jump-cuts, and close-ups, moving backward and forward in time to get at a story of U.S.-Philippine relations by way of history, literature, language, and scholarship. It even opens with a six-page Cast of Characters, some historical, many from pop culture, a few fictional. While at first the book seems gonzo in its approach, the result is a portrait (though incomplete) of Casiana Nacionales, the insurrecto for whom the book is named, a woman whom "history barely knows." Nacionales was the only woman who actively participated in a rebellion against U.S. servicemen in 1901 after a period of occupation marked by cruelty on one end and breathtaking abandonment on the other. To be clear: The book is not explicitly about Nacionales. Her appearance, like an image emerging on film, serves as a metaphor for how the truth of history is repressed until something or someone brings it into the light. To anchor the novel, Apostol uses two characters: Magsalin, a Filipino writer/translator, and Chiara, a U.S. filmmaker. Their contrasting approaches and accounts of the rebellion ultimately get to what Magsalin and Chiara believe they failed at, of telling "a story of war and loss so repressed and so untold." Magsalin and Chiara may have failed, but Apostol did not. The U.S. may have "manufactured how to see the world," but it's the writers, artists, and other visionaries who speak outside the frame who can reveal the truth. The cast of characters and the out-of-order system of numbering chapters are best revisited after finishing the book.Dazzling, interlocking narratives on history, truth, and storytelling. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
With its dizzying shifts of perspective, Apostol's (Gun Dealers' Daughter) latest novel has the feel of an experimental film or video art installation. Films and filmmaking are also at the center of the labyrinthine plot, which features Magsalin, a Filipino translator and mystery author, and Chiara, an American filmmaker. The story begins as Chiara enlists Magsalin's help on her script about the 1901 Balangiga Massacre. In 1898, the United States was met with resistance from the Philippines after it was acquired, along with Puerto Rico and Guam, from Spain at the end of the Spanish-American War. In retaliation for a Filipino revolutionary attack that killed 48 American soldiers, Gen. Jacob H. Smith, who was eventually court-martialed, ordered soldiers to kill everyone over the age of ten and turn the countryside into a "howling wilderness." Like American and Filipino historians who have provided conflicting accounts of the massacre, Chiara and Magsalin's personal histories influence the way they think the movie script should represent and interpret the historical event. With its dense, carefully crafted prose and complicated narrative structure (the chapters are not numbered sequentially), this requires careful attention. VERDICT Veteran narrator Justine Eyre gamely and enjoyably relates the vignettes, but only the most diligent listeners and serious experimental fiction fans will have the patience to piece together the hopscotching, though ultimately rewarding, narrative. ["Worthy of a place in collections strong in postcolonial and experimental fiction": LJ 10/15/18 review of the Soho hc.]-Beth Farrell, Cleveland State Univ. Law Lib. © Copyright 2019. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.