Book Discussion: Insurrecto by Gina Apostol

Welcome to the Zaanstad Women's Meet-up book club!

For our third meeting, we will be talking about "Insurrecto" by Gina Apostol

Accolades:

"Humor, Mark Twain said, is tragedy plus time. Surely no better line exists to explain Gina Apostol's brilliant new novel, “Insurrecto,” a book haunted by a real episode of horrific wartime violence that is, nevertheless, relentlessly funny." - Jen McDonald, New York Times

"The subtext is serious and the book’s narrative games buoy up the whole reading experience. It’s true that the Balangiga aftermath foreshadows – with depressing continuity – later events such as Vietnam and Abu Ghraib, but this is also a novel about Elvis Presley, karaoke, uprootedness, and Muhammad Ali’s Thrilla in Manila." - JS Tennant, The London Magazine

"Insurrecto gives us this barbaric slice of our national history not through guilty American eyes but through furiously good-natured Filipino eyes, which hope we'll grasp two things. First, that we will never understand the modern Philippines, in all its warmth, humor and violence, without knowing the story of places like Balangiga. And second, that we can't understand modern America without knowing the stories of what we did in our past." - John Powers, NPR

Description:

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.

Good to know:

As you're reading, please note down questions you may want to ask the group. It may be something that you found interesting or needs clarifying.

If you are unable to get a copy of the book, please send me a message.

Location:

Cafe Fabriek. It is a 10-min walk from the Zaandam station, through the shopping street (Gedempte Gracht).