George Custer and was every bit as enlightened, ordered his soldiers to kill everyone over the age of 10. It happened in Balangiga in 1901, where - with help from a woman insurrecto, or revolutionary - Filipino locals attacked occupying American soldiers. Magsalin and Chiara's road trip is a way of exploring an episode that I'd never heard of - one that, like the Philippine-American War itself, we haven't so much forgotten as repressed. She dishes up funny riffs on everything from the "Thrilla in Manila" and her countrymen's love of Elvis Presley to what the book terms the Filipino Chekhov Rule: If you mention karaoke in the first chapter, somebody has to sing it in the last one.įor all its fizzy style, Insurrecto is anchored in the pain of lived history. Rather, she's playful like Italo Calvino or Kurt Vonnegut. But let me assure you that the novel goes down easily and becomes clearer by the end.įor Apostol is no mystifier or arid avant-gardiste. Now, I must admit that Insurrecto does require readers to cope with a few moments of disorientation.
And we start wondering why the chapter numbers are appearing in the wrong order. Soon, we're reading two rival versions of scripts - one about a Daisy Buchanan-ish white American war photographer in the Philippines, the other about a Filipina schoolteacher who's had an affair with Chiara's dad.īefore we know it, reality and fiction are cross-pollinating - there are stories about telling stories, and every character seems to have a double. But after Magsalin reads Chiara's script, she begins writing one of her own. She's a fashionable American filmmaker, whose father shot a funky Vietnam War picture in the Philippines (shades of Sofia Coppola).Īuthor Interviews An American And Her Filipina Translator Exhume A Massacre In 'Insurrecto' The story starts when our heroine - Magsalin, a Filipina translator and mystery writer - goes to Manila's Muhammad Ali Mall (yes, that's a real place) to meet Chiara Brasi. and the Philippines, which America colonized for 50 years after claiming to liberate it from Spain in the late 19th century. One of the most original ones I've found is Insurrecto, a dizzying new novel by Gina Apostol, who was born in the Philippines but now lives in the United States.īeginning in a present day Manila overseen by thuggish President Duterte, this witty, sneakily revelatory book dives into something that most Americans know virtually nothing about - the tortuous relationship between the U.S. That's why, these days, I seek out books and movies that show how the world appears from the other side of the colonial looking glass. And I still love them, though I now realize that they usually look at other cultures from the vantage point of outsiders, even intruders. Forster's A Passage to India to the surreal Vietnam of Apocalypse Now. How?Įver since I was young, I've loved stories set in the far-flung reaches of the West's many empires - from the British Raj of E. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Insurrecto Author Gina Apostol
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