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the complete review - fiction

Insurrecto

by
Gina Apostol

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : bustling, interesting take on history and the memory and representation of it

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "(A) risk-taking, cinematic look at Duterte’s Philippines and the 1901 Balangiga massacre during the Philippine-American war. (...) Perhaps Insurrecto’s greatest weakness is that it is too much of a polemical argument, but when it returns to what you can experience, it has much to offer." - Nilanjana Roy, Financial Times
  
  
• "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. " - Tash Aw, The Guardian
  
  
• "Gina Apostol’s stunning novel Insurrecto offers a nuanced narration that deftly illustrates the power of perspective and the importance of the storyteller while revisiting the complicated history of the Philippines. (...) An arresting novel with a timely political message, Apostol’s Insurrecto dazzles with its inventive structure and superb portrayals of women as leaders of ingenuity, creativity and reason." - Rigoberto González, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "The novel brims with plot. Yet plot is almost beside the point. More interesting are Apostol’s many women, stand-ins and doppelgängers whose stories intercut and complicate. (...) Apostol is a magician with language (think Borges, think Nabokov) who can swing from slang and mockery to the stodgy argot of critical theory. She puns with gusto, potently and unabashedly, until one begins reading double meanings, allusions and ulterior motives into everything. (...) The novel’s structure reflects how history comes at us in scattered shards, the way voices are amplified or silenced, story lines invented or forgotten." - Jen McDonald, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Unmistakably, the book teems with extravagant instances of writing that are memorable for literary flair. But it’s not just that flair, or panache, that distinguishes Apostol’s superior quality as an author. Overwhelming evidence of erudition is also displayed on every page. Literary, academic, cultural, experiential and online “woke”-fulness is brandished; I wouldn’t say fiercely, but it’s not entirely subtle either, rather much like second nature as a PoMo feature. Littérateurs may nod, swoon or gasp over her audacious turns of passage, which are like multi-level access and egress points through a cloverleaf flyover that leads to sundry highways." - Alfred A. Yuson, The Philippine Star
  
  
• "Insurrecto is a deliberately labyrinthine novel but at its core is the relationship between two women. (...) In order to reflect fully on these complexities of a globalized world, Apostol takes in a good deal of the thinking that shapes contemporary understanding in her multi-stranded story. (...) Apostol’s novel wears its learning lightly, often humorously, alluding to the irony of theories intended to enlighten that are presented in inscrutable language." - Kate Webb, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "The game-playing that makes up so much of Insurrecto (...) suggests that Apostol trusts Brechtian alienation to force readers into a rational critical stance. But highlighting fictionality in these many ways is risky. It is an approach that threatens to undermine – and in Apostol’s hands indeed does undermine – the one vital truth at the heart of the story: the injustice of the massacre in Balangiga." - Tadzio Koelb, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Ms. Apostol is preoccupied by the ways that history is mediated -- and inevitably distorted -- by artists and journalists, whether through photography, films or books. In the deconstructionist tradition, her own storytelling collapses into its forms of artifice. (...) Insurrecto will be brain candy for the theory-minded, but it leaves the war itself feeling as abstract as ever." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Film is central to Insurrecto, and even beyond that it is a cinematic novel. An introductory six-page 'Cast of Characters' offers some guidance to what lies ahead in the two-part novel. Part One is: 'A Mystery', bringing together Chiara Brasi -- daughter of filmmaker Ludo Brasi, in whose professional footsteps she has followed -- and Magsalin, a Philippines-born writer and translator ("hence her professional name: Magsalin. (It means to translate in her maternal grandfather's tongue, Tagalog.)") whom Chiara wants to hire to accompany her as she researches a horrific massacre of Filipinos by American troops in Balangiga, Samar, in 1901. Part Two is: 'Duel Scripts', as both women come closer to the event -- traveling in that direction, but also via their script-visions of how to present this material (as Magsalin has gone beyond her original remit and come up with her own 'translation' of Chiara's screenplay -- which the latter does not take kindly to: "You are replacing the story. It's not a version. It's an invasion").
       Insurrecto cuts back and forth cinematically too. The text is deliberately structured -- but, as the fact that the first chapter/scene is numbered "20" immediately makes clear, not in the most obvious, straightforward way. (The chapter-numbering is only occasionally sequential, and often jumps back and forth; there's also, for example, a chapter numbered "16, also 26", while chapter 1 first appears only about a third of the way into novel -- and then additional chapter 1s keep popping up .....). The novel also moves back and forth across timelines and perspectives, not just Chiara and Magsalin in the present-day, but also from their pasts, including via the scripts, which treat the events around 1901 as well as Ludo's 1970s filmmaking efforts.
       The historical event is one that doesn't seem to be widely remembered -- part of Apostol's point. It is certainly a shocking one:

     The Balangiga incident of 1901 is a true story in two parts, a blip in the Philippine-American War (which is a blip in the Spanish-American War, which is a blip in latter-day outbreaks of imperial hysteria in Southeast Asian wars, which are a blip in the infinite spiral of human aggression in the livid days of this dying planet, and so on).
     Part One: An uprising of Filipinos against an American outpost in Samar (the exposition here would be a fascinating movie in itself, though with too many local color details) leads to forty-eight American deaths, with twenty-two wounded and four missing in action.
     Part Two: The US commanding general demands in retaliation the murder of every Filipino male in Samar above ten years of age. Blood bathes the province. Americans savage -- "kill and burn" is the technical term -- close to thirty thousand Filipinos, men, women, and children

     Manila is necrotized in America, too -- scar tissue so deeply hidden and traumatized no one needs to know it. One is in the other and the other is in one, she thought, feeling ill in Nashville. Her self overdubbed, multiplied, intercut, and hyperlinked, but which is to be master, she wondered, feeling dizzy, about to fall (she also had too much Kentucky bourbon).

- M.A.Orthofer, 17 November 2018

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Links:

• Soho Press publicity page
• Fitzcarraldo Editions publicity page
• Insurrecto/The Unintended site
• Q & A site

• the arts desk
• Asian Review of Books
• Booklist
• Boston Globe
• Cha
• The FilAm
• The Guardian
• Kirkus Reviews
• The Los Angeles Times
• The Philippine Star
• Public Seminar
• Publishers Weekly

• Official site

• Bibliolepsy
• The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata

• See Index of South East Asian literature

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About the Author:

       Filipino author Gina Apostol was born in 1963.

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© 2018-2022 the complete review

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