Description
Book SynopsisIn 1901, Filipino revolutionaries attacked an American garrison in Balangiga, on the island of Samar, and American soldiers created ‘a howling wilderness’ of the surrounding countryside in retaliation, murdering thousands of the inhabitants of Balangiga. In the 1970s, the American filmmaker Ludo Brasi went missing in Samar while shooting a movie, The Unintended, inspired by these events. In 2018, his daughter Chiara and the Filipino translator Magsalin go on a road trip in Duterte’s Philippines. Chiara is working on a film about the Balangiga massacre, when Magsalin reads Chiara’s film script and writes her own version of the story. Within the spiralling voices and narrative layers of Insurrecto are stories of women – artists, lovers, revolutionaries, daughters – finding their way to their own truths and histories. By pushing up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, Gina Apostol shows us the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war.
Trade Review‘A bravura performance in which war becomes farce, history becomes burlesque... 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.’
— Jen McDonald, New York Times
‘[A] thrillingly imagined and provocative inquiry into the nature of stories and the unfolding of history in our collective consciousness. ... [Insurrecto] 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 – a smart writer, a sharp critic, a keen intellectual – takes on the vexed relationship between the Philippines and the United States, pivoting on that relationship’s bloody origins. Insurrecto is meta-fictional, meta-cinematic, even meta-meta, plunging us into the vortex of memory, history, and war where we can feel what it means to be forgotten, and what it takes to be remembered.’
— Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of The Sympathizer
‘A risk-taking, cinematic look at Duterte’s Philippines and the 1901 Balangiga massacre during the Philippine-American war... Apostol uses techniques from Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar, expecting the reader to trust her as the story hopscotches through time and space. But for readers accustomed to the jump-cuts and montages of cinema, Insurrecto doesn’t present a challenge so much as a cascade of pleasures and possibilities.’
— Nilajana Roy, Financial Times
