Insurrecto: A Novel

by Gina Apostol Narrated by Justine Eyre

Overview

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.

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. But at its heart this is a novel of emotional power that grapples with our endless ability to erase the past. Apostol pushes up against the limits of fiction in order to recover the atrocity in Balangiga, and in so doing, she reveals the dark heart of an untold and forgotten war that would shape the next century of Philippine and American history.

Editorial Reviews

DECEMBER 2018 - AudioFile

Listeners may not have heard of the 1901 Balangiga massacre in the Philippines. That’s all the more reason we need Justine Eyre's strong performance in this reimagining of the conflict between the townspeople and American soldiers. Eyre creates smooth transitions between the perspectives of American filmmaker Chiara and Filipino translator Magsalin. Each of the women writes a screenplay about this bloody historical moment, one focused on soldiers, the other about townspeople. Eyre captures both high-minded Chiara, whose ethnocentric screenplay tells only one side of the story, and tentative Magsalin, whose confidence develops over time. Listeners can be very sure whose part of the story they are in throughout. Together, the narrators bring us the full picture of this dark episode in history. M.R. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171447809
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	11/13/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

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